


Always Darkest Before Dawn

by sunspot (unavoidedcrisis)



Category: Leverage
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Ancient Egyptian Literature & Mythology, Apocalypse, Big Bang Challenge, Death, Dog(s), Gen, Original Character Death(s), Souls
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-21
Updated: 2011-12-21
Packaged: 2017-10-27 15:55:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 29,795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/297545
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unavoidedcrisis/pseuds/sunspot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One of the mysteries of the universe is why Parker, of all people, gets the ability to see a soul after it departs the body of the recently deceased. They're glittery and she's Parker, so of course she starts picking them up, not knowing what they really are. Of course, she could just look in the instruction manual... but oh, no, Hardison's taken it.</p><p>Then the hellhound shows up and starts eating the doors off her cupboards, and Eliot is breaking into people's homes to threaten them with tape and knives. It's been a very stressful couple of weeks and all Parker wants is a vacation, or a nice, relaxing art theft, but now the forces of darkness (whatever that means) are bent on destroying the world. And then, if she somehow ever gets that mess sorted out, Hardison's been complaining that all his Hot Pockets taste like doom...</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part One

**Author's Note:**

> Written for apocabigbang 2010. Fusion based on Christopher Moore's A Dirty Job. Previous knowledge of that story absolutely not required. Beta'd by cherie_morte, with art by hollow_echos. [Originally posted at Dreamwidth.](http://sunspot.dreamwidth.org/18257.html)

When it came time to write this one down in the annals of history, it would be chalked up to 'wrong place, wrong time.' Unfortunately, Parker had had no inclination of this when she went into the house, or else she probably would have made sure she was in a different place or at least a different time.

The con of the week wasn't anything stressful or mentally challenging, at least for Parker's part. All the heavy lifting was literally Eliot's problem this week, and Hardison was the one who had been up for forty-six hours staring at a computer monitor. Parker only had to slip into the rich jerk's house and lift the business deeds from the safe in the bedroom while Sophie kept him busy downstairs in his office.

She hauled herself up over the windowsill into his cushy bedroom and sucked in a sharp breath. "Nice," she muttered.

"Stop looking for decorating tips, Parker, and find the damn safe already!" Eliot hissed in her ear bud. Apparently getting pushed off a two storey balcony into a fuchsia bush made him more than a little tetchy.

"I'm going," she muttered, rolling her eyes at his typical impatience. She could practically set a watch to most of his behaviours and the way he got frustrated so easily when they were on a job was definitely one of those behaviours. _Eliot's bitching? Must be Wednesday._

Parker went through the room methodically, checking all the most common places for hiding a safe. She found it hidden behind an ugly painting of dolphins playing poker (how, oh how, could anyone think that any animal playing poker was a cute idea?). The combination was pathetically easy to crack -- the last four digits of the guy's social security number -- and she found all the paperwork they needed right in front of her, like someone had known she was coming.

If the universe was kind and benevolent, maybe something would have tipped her off about the whole situation and she would have been able to get out right then. If the universe was even just mostly neutral or apathetic, maybe she would have tripped and knocked herself unconscious and had to endure a few days of lecturing from Eliot, whom Nate would have sent to rescue her. But as it was, the universe was one big, giant, hateful spite-douche, and so Parker heard the strange noise coming from the adjoining bathroom, and her cat-like tendency to curiosity drew her in like a fluffy blue monster to a plate of cookies.

Along with her cat-like affection for all things curious, Parker also had cat-like reflexes, which was the only reason she was able to keep her balance on the slick tile floor. She caught herself on the edge of the counter and only then noticed the water spilling over the sides of a bath tub and all over the floor, and even beginning to seep into the carpet she had just walked over.

Water was pouring over the sides of the tub and it only took a quick glance for Parker to realize why. A woman's nude body was floating face down in the claw footed tub.

Parker bit down hard on her tongue to stop from screaming and alerting the people downstairs that she was there. She clutched at the counter and tried to catch her breath. She was about to turn and run when something else caught her eye.

On the counter next to the elegant, swan shaped faucets, something shiny and red was glowing. Of course, her curiosity got the better of her and she all but slid across the wet floor to get a better look, eager to have a reason to take her eyes off the woman in the bath.

The shining thing by the sink was a necklace. Freshwater pearls, if Parker was any judge. The red glow faded and came back, almost like a heartbeat, even after she picked it up. The necklace didn't feel warm, it didn't cast any light, and it wasn't giving off a noise or a smell. Just a bright, red glow. Parker stared, transfixed, until she noticed the wet soaking through her shoes and socks. She hid the necklace in her pocket and ran for the window.

When Sophie asked later, in the van, why her shoes were wet, Parker didn't have any answer for her. She just shrugged and slipped her hand in her pocket. Her fingers brushed gently against the pearls and she didn't meet anyone's eyes. If anyone thought Parker was being strange, they didn't mention it.

* * *

Once Hardison dropped her off at her place, she locked herself in the closet and pulled the necklace from her pocket. She was gentle with it, because the pearls looked old and she was worried about them breaking or smashing, but also because it was still glowing, bright red and then fading and bright red and then fading. Parker lost track of time staring at it, trying to figure out why or where it had come from and why the dead woman had it.

Something flip-flopped inside of her when she wondered if the two were connected more closely. Did the necklace kill the woman? Parker thought quickly about all the reasons that was crazy and came up with plenty of them, and yet she couldn't shake the idea that the lady's death and the glowing necklace were somehow related.

Parker carefully twined the strand around her fingers, then unwound it, over and over again, watching the glow in the darkness of the closet and thinking. She knew something was strange about the necklace, obviously, but she just couldn't fit all the pieces together.

She fell asleep in the closet that night with the necklace tight in her hand.

* * *

Death, at that moment, was not so far away, looking over paperwork. Or maybe not. Death might have been reading, or more likely just watching things happen. No one really knew what Death was doing at the time, except everyone was quite sure that Death was waiting.

* * *

Eliot slammed the newspaper down on the table between Parker's cereal bowl and Hardison's elbow. "What the hell, Parker?" he demanded.

Hardison and Parker both looked up, startled.

"They found that guy's wife dead last night in the upstairs bedroom. Like, ten minutes after we cleared out," Eliot explained to Hardison, then he turned on Parker again. "How did you miss that? Were you asleep up there?"

Parker stared at him with wide eyes. "I... I'm not sure."

Eliot gave her a hard look for a moment, and then sighed and sat down with them at the table. "Jeez, Parker, be more careful. What if you'd gotten hurt?"

Parker wasn't sure if she was supposed to take that as 'what if you'd been hurt and then we'd all be sad?' or 'what if you'd been hurt and then I'd have to come bail your ass out?' but she decided to give Eliot the benefit of the doubt and assume he meant it selflessly.

"Sorry," she muttered. Eliot patted her arm.

While Nate and Sophie went over the new, improvised version of the plan that now accounted for the man's dead wife, Hardison went over some of the documents that Parker had retrieved from the safe. Eliot was reading over his shoulder and they were both reading out the relevant details, so Parker didn't have to crowd over them as well.

Nothing in the paperwork gave her any indication where the oddly glowing necklace had come from, but she wasn't surprised. They were just property deeds from some downtown properties the shady businessman had been using to house illegal workers and stolen merchandise.

Parker decided she had to go back to the house to look for answers, but she knew she couldn't very well declare her intention to the rest of the team. She wasn't supposed to be stealing for herself anymore, especially not a dead woman's jewellery.

It was two more days before she could get away. The job had gone swimmingly, as far as anyone could tell, and Nate was even promising a few days of downtime before they took on another one. Life was pretty swell. Other than the red, glowing pearls and the weird headache she couldn't seem to shake.

Parker staked out the house in a little blue Hyundai Elantra she had picked up a few blocks from her house and settled in to wait until the time felt right to break in again.

There were only a few lights on, shining through some of the ground floor windows of the mansion, but she waited until every single one went out before she slid from the car and approached the house.

Halfway up the lawn, Parker froze. There was someone else sneaking up to the house, someone who was clearly not as skilled or experienced in the art of breaking and entering as she was. She could see their bright white sneakers, almost fluorescing in the darkness. Parker pressed herself against the closest tree, trying to shrink down into invisibility. She watched the white-shoed person walking to and fro in front of the biggest bay window on the main floor and waited.

"Dammit, shit, dammit," the white-shoed person said. Parker could tell from the voice that it was a man, but she still couldn't make out what he looked like. "Stupid night time, stupid bars on stupid windows, stupid blonde girl..."

Parker's hand flew to her head of its own accord, even though she knew her hair was covered with a hat. She reached up and caught the lowest branch of the tree and pulled herself up very slowly.

The man on the lawn beneath her turned to leave, and, as he did, he looked up and locked eyes with Parker. She muttered a curse under her breath.

"Blonde!" the man called out. He immediately winced. "Blonde," he repeated, much quieter. "Come here. I want to talk to you."

Parker swung down from the tree on the side opposite the man and sprinted across the lawn. Unfortunately for her, he had predicted she would try something like that and tackled her to the ground two feet from the car she'd arrived in.

Her hands and knees burned when they scraped the asphalt, and she flipped over immediately, connecting her heel with the man's shoulder and pushing hard. He sprawled backwards on his ass and looked up at her with big, scared eyes.

"Sorry! Sorry. Jeez, I just wanted to talk to you," he said, holding up his hands in a surrender gesture, but then he winced. He looked at his palms. "Owwie," he said.

Parker paused with her hand on the knife Eliot had given her to wear in her boot. She was pretty sure a homicidal rapist wasn't going to say 'owwie'. "Who the hell are you?" she asked. If he said 'homicidal rapist', she would stab him, but not before. That would be jumping the gun.

"You took something that belongs to me. Kinda. A little. In a weird way."

"That really doesn't help me. I'm a thief. I take things that belong to a lot of people." Parker crossed her arms over her chest and continued to stare.

"My name is Paul. We've never met before, but you're the one who took the thing from the old lady."

She had the sinking suspicion she knew what he was referring to, but she played it off. Besides, with the number of old women she may or may not have robbed at one point or another, there was always room for error. "Again Paul, _thief_ ," she said, indicating herself up and down. "Taken a lot of things."

"You took something that belonged to the woman who died up there. I don't know what it was though, just that it was in the bedroom when she died and then you went in there and then it was gone." Paul was still sprawled on his back in the road, still regarding her with a mixed look of terror and attraction.

"It was in the bathroom... Oh."

Paul snorted. "Smooth. Now hand it over."

"I don't have it anymore," she lied.

He groaned and laid his head back on the pavement. "Fine. Just leave me here until a truck comes by," he said, crossing his arms across his chest like a wannabe corpse.

"Uh. Okay." Parker was already in the car with the key in the ignition before he realized what she was doing and struggled to his feet. She was gone before he could get her to stop.

* * *

When Nate had to stop his briefing the third time to nudge Parker awake, he got exasperated. "Parker, what is going on with you?" he asked later, when everyone had gone their separate ways to get ready for the next job.

She didn't say anything because she didn't know what _to_ say.

" You know that if something's bothering you, you can tell me about it, right?"

Parker crossed her arms over her chest. "I know." She sounded so small, and Nate was exponentially more concerned. Parker tried to smile, which was a little alarming.

"Parker," Nate sighed again. "Whatever it is, we're here if you need us. Now go get some sleep, because we're going to steal a Malayan tapir tomorrow, and you need to be at the top of your game."

* * *

Parker took the red, glowing necklace to a pawn shop early one morning a few days later, after what was only referred to in the future as The Very Bad Idea Job (With Tapirs). The man behind the counter didn't notice anything out of the ordinary when he touched it, and he gave her a pretty good deal on it. Truth be told, she would have taken a lot less than what they agreed on. She just wanted to be rid of it.

"I think I'll give it to my daughter," he smiled fondly, folding the pearls across his hand. "She turned sixteen yesterday."

"Yeah. Great," Parker said, trying not to look bored. Her hands were itching to get the money and leave the necklace behind. By this point, she had decided whatever it was, it was more trouble to her than anything else. A little bit of trouble was alright, but between the scrapes on her knees from being tackled by crazy-Paul-in-the-white-tennis-shoes and the way the red glow kept her up all night (even if she hid the necklace in the bottom of her special trunk and put Bunny on sentry duty), Parker knew it was too much trouble.

"Oh, here she is now!" the pawn man beamed. "Come here, darling, I have a present for you."

The man rambled for a minute or two, and Parker barely noticed the plain looking girl, even after the man introduced them. What Parker did notice was the moment the girl touched the strand of pearls, the red glow dissipated and it looked just like a regular necklace. The girl smiled.

Parker furiously tried to think of something to say, but she couldn't. The man pressed some money into her hands and thanked her again, and Parker left without another word, mind in a daze.

* * *

Paul thought she was very attractive. So, she was weird, she'd kicked him to the pavement and yeah, she was a professional thief. But she was hot _and_ blonde, so that made him forgive a lot of the other stuff. He watched her leave the pawn shop and turn the first corner she came to from his vantage point in the window of the coffee shop across the street. It wasn't even stalking, he reasoned, because he wasn't following her per say... He was only following whatever it was she had taken and presumably sold to the pawn shop.

The bell above the door jangled and the man behind the counter looked up. "Hello."

"'Morning," Paul smiled. "That young woman who just came in? She's my sister-in-law," Paul smiled sweetly. "I was wondering if you would tell me if she sold anything to you. See, I'm worried her and my brother are in some hot water, financially, and if she sold an heirloom to pay the bills or something..." Paul paused to put on his best concerned look. "Well, I just worry, is all."

The man explained the necklace and that he had given it to his daughter, and, just when he started to explain that _no, he would not be selling it back, even if Paul begged,_ Paul saw that the necklace wasn't glowing.

He all but ran out of the store and up the street, turning the same corner that the girl had, but she was nowhere to be seen.

"Yeah," he sighed, scrubbing his hands over his face. "This is definitely going to bite me in the ass."

* * *

Two weeks passed and Parker had almost fully forgotten the mysterious pearl necklace and the weird man in the white shoes. She hadn't forgotten how much she loved ice cream floats though, because it's easier to remember things that are delicious and creamy, instead of things that are odd and creepy.

There was a place a few blocks from hers that made great floats, and a quick glance at the clock on wall told her maybe it was still open. Parker took her favourite route to the ice cream shop -- across the rooves of all the buildings between there and her house.

When the wind rushed through her hair and the streets melted away beneath her feet, Parker always felt alive. She smiled down at the city, _her city_ , while she jumped from the top of the one building to the low hanging roof of the next. It must have rained earlier in the day, because the roads glittered like the sky on a clear night.

Parker paused on the edge of the next roof and looked down, counting the people on the sidewalks. She saw a young couple kissing under a lamp post and smiled briefly to herself. If she were down on street level, she would be able to strip them of all their shiny valuables, probably even including belt buckles, without them ever taking their tongues out of each other's mouths. _Ah, young love._

She swung herself onto the ladder on the edge of the building. She wasn't exactly planning on stealing belt buckles, but maybe she would walk by and see if they were wearing nice watches.

As Parker's feet hit the asphalt, a bus came around the corner. She noticed it, in the absent way people notice faraway music or a shadow passing overheard. She approached the amorous couple as the bus did and suddenly everything seemed to be moving very fast and very slow at the same time.

The couple broke apart while she watched. They were laughing, happy and bright, and Parker could hear them from where she stood, rooted to the spot. When the girl stepped back, her foot slipped off the curb and as she began to fall back into the street, her eyes went wide.

She must have been afraid of falling, or maybe just surprised, because Parker thought about it later and there was no way she would have seen the bus coming.

It flattened the happy, laughing, surprised girl into the road like an overripe jack o' lantern on November 9th. It could have been a passing fancy, but Parker thought she heard bone splinter.

It was not passing fancy that she heard screaming. Everyone else who was on the street was screaming. Even Parker screamed a little. She didn't run, although she wanted to, because that would draw unnecessary attention to her. Parker walked as quickly as she could away from the scene, and, just before she disappeared into the night like a good thief, she saw the pulsating red light in the gutter next to the paste that had once been a body.

Parker hid in the chaos on the street and used a spare second to pick up the keychain. She rounded the corner and was gone before the sirens even started sounding off in the distance.

* * *

Death was everywhere and anywhere that Death wanted or needed to be. Death was there in the street. Death was five hundred miles away at a hospital, sitting by the bedside of a single mother between her two young sons, listening to tearful goodbyes. Death was developing a fondness for good scotch. Death was watching fish swim in the deepest oceans depths.

* * *

The ice cream float was a wistful dream. Parker paced back and forth at the end of her bed, not stopping, but occasionally throwing suspicious glances at the offending keychain. It seemed harmless enough. Three keys and a little square piece of plastic with a picture of smiling cartoon kitten and the words 'World's Best Sister' printed on it. It was a little scuffed up, like it had been around for a while, but otherwise there was absolutely nothing remarkable about it.

Other than the fact it was glowing bright red for no discernable reason. That was something people would probably remark about.

After a few more minutes of pacing and thinking and worrying, Parker wrapped it in an old sock, put the sock in a box, used two locks to lock the box in a bigger box, wrapped the bigger box in an old newspaper and hid it under a duffle bag full of money in the back of the closet.

Then she put on a clean pair of pants and called Hardison and Eliot to take her out for a few shots of something strong. She thought the alcohol would settle her nerves and take the edge off the shock she was pretty sure she was in. She had seen a woman get flattened by a bus, after all, and that seemed like the kind of thing that would put a person into some sort of emotional shock.

The third shot went down much easier than the first two, and the fourth was practically pleasant. Parker thought, hey, maybe Nate was onto something, and then Parker stopped thinking altogether.

* * *

Even with a life full of questionable actions, deeds, words and people, this was by far the most suspect thing Hardison could recall. Or at least, he thought it was. All the alcohol he'd had the night before with Parker and Eliot was still swimming warmly through his veins and it was possible he was mistaken.

 _Pretty Blonde Girl Who Kicks Hard,_ the front of the package read.

It was post marked the day before, without a return address, but processed within the city. It was meant for Parker, that much was obvious (Hardison had been on the wrong end of one of those kicks once and it was absolutely not something he wanted to repeat), but with no indication of what it contained or where it had come from.

It could be something dangerous, he reasoned, and he didn't want Parker to open something that might hurt her. At the same time, if it was something that could hurt her, it was something that could hurt him, and he really didn't want to open it either. This was one of those times he wished Eliot was around. That man was indestructible -- unless the booze had killed him.

Hardison felt the package gingerly, like if he squeezed it too hard it would pop and spray him with goo. Hardison didn't like goo. It felt like a book or a stack of papers. Very carefully, bracing for possible goo or goo-related impact, Hardison slit the edge of the envelope open and tipped it over the table.

A shiny black book landed face down next to a stack of junk mail flyers. A little hand lettered card fluttered out of the envelope and just said 'congrats,' in scratchy letters.

Hardison frowned in mild confusion and flipped the book over to see the title.

The title read: _The Great Big Book of Death._

* * *

Parker slunk into headquarters looking and feeling very sorry for herself indeed. She didn't smell sorry for herself. She mostly smelled like stale booze and terrible decisions. That's what Sophie told her, anyways.

Nate was about to start again about how worried he was and was anything wrong, and Sophie looked poised to jump in as well, when Hardison appeared from the other room, wincing and covering his ears.

"Please can we just whisper everything today?"

Sophie said he smelled worse than Parker, but she and Nate let it drop because drinking with friends was a very different bad decision type of creature than drinking alone.

Hardison gave Parker a strange look and a one armed hug. "You feeling better, mama?"

Parker mumbled something into the crook of his neck.

"That good, hmm?"

She smiled at him. It was weak and distracted, but Hardison appreciated the effort. "I'm all for trying to cheer you up anytime, Parker, but next time we should try apple juice, okay?"

* * *

"Kuk kuk kuk," hissed the voice in walls. It sounded like an opossum choking on a toad that was too big to swallow whole.

The thing had only just found its voice after so much time had passed and was still relearning how to make sounds. The thing with the strange new-old voice watched the woman with the golden hair. It hissed again and shrank back from the flecks of light thrown from her hair.

It did not like her at all.

* * *

That night, alone in his own apartment, Hardison thumbed through _The Great Big Book of Death._ He had absolutely not given it to Parker, because she had been quiet and sad and not like herself, and some sick weirdo's idea of a joke book was not something he wanted to subject her to.

Besides, _Pretty Blonde Girl Who Kicks Hard_ was not actually addressed to anyone in particular, and so it wasn't like he was stealing someone's mail or anything. That would be a crime.

Hardison took a fortifying swig of orange soda and eyed the happy cartoon skeleton on the cover of the book. Little dead people were speared on each of his spooky bony fingers, like the most demented shish kabobs Hardison could imagine. The cartoon corpses were gory and each of them had an expression akin to... Well, despite the uncomfortable feeling it gave him, Hardison had to admit they looked like they were each in the midst of very serious orgasms.

It was the fact that the book was so cheery and brightly coloured and still proclaimed it was _The Great Big Book of Death._ It's like it couldn't decide whether it was happy or sad or something else altogether. That's what was weirding Hardison out. That and the fact someone thought Parker needed to have it.

Hardison opened the book and started to read.

_'So now you're Death! Here's what you'll need...'_

* * *

Death though the pictures were quite nice.

* * *

The dark, empty space between the walls was not empty at all. "Kuk kuk kukuu," spluttered the oozing, creeping blackness that had once been a thing and was trying to become a thing again. It could smell the smell of souls, could feel them pulsing in the place outside of the darkness.

The light, it was called. The world.

The dark thing was starting to remember more and more about the world the longer it was about in it. The world was a horrible place, but it was a horrible place the dark thing would devour.

But first, the dark thing had to get rid of the shiny haired nuisance who couldn't keep her hands to herself.

She was sitting alone and close to the wall. The dark creature twisted and turned in the hollow between the walls and tangled itself in the electrical wiring. It played havoc with the wires and the fuses, and then it found the right wire. The perfect wire. It was a little loose and connected to the right part of the grid. The thing twisted to and fro, and the wire came free.

When the wire came loose, the power shorted out and a big zap of electricity arced from outlet on the wall and hit the girl. She yelped. The lights flickered and went out.

Then the darkness between the walls remembered how to smile.

* * *

"Are you okay, Parker?" Sophie asked while Hardison and Nate examined the offending wall socket with a flashlight.

"Fine," she said, rubbing the back of her neck where the jolt had hit her. "That hurt."

Eliot snorted back a laugh. "Maybe you won't be so quick to taser everyone you meet now, hmm?"

Parker and Sophie glared. "You're mean when you're hungover," Parker told him.

In the end, they had to cut a hole in the wall to get to the electrical panel.

"Weird," Hardison said, after a brief investigation. "I can fix it, but... Looks like it's been pulled right out. But who could have done that?"

* * *

The hot, panting breath on her face woke Parker from a dark and twisting maze of haunted dreams and mostly-suppressed memories. Her fingers closed around the hilt of the knife that lay under her pillow before she had even fully opened her eyes. The nightlight on the wall across from the bed barely cast a glow on the tiles, but it was enough to assure her there was no one lurking in her bedroom, waiting to make a move.

No one but not nothing.

Parker would have given this awkward phrasing some additional thought, but the overlarge dog sitting on the trunk at the foot of her bed and staring intently at her gave her pause. Or rather, it gave her paws.

"Oof!" she squeaked when the dog placed its two front paws on her shoulders and jumped floppily from the trunk to the bed. Parker fell back helplessly against the mattress and tried to squirm away from the happy tongue, but she ended up with a face full of dog spit anyways.

She finally slid sideways off the bed, squeaking when she landed hard on the floor. The dog peered down at her, tilting its head like it was asking 'why are you down there now? Should I be down there too?'

"How did you get in here?" Parker asked, not expecting (and really hoping not to receive) an answer. "Whose dog are you?" She stood and backed up against the wall, hand questing for the light switch without looking away from the quizzical canine on the bed.

If possible, the dog was even bigger in the light. Parker blinked a few times until her eyes adjusted, but when her vision focused again, she confirmed that yes, it was a freaking enormous dog. Identifying dog breeds on sight was really not her wheelhouse, but if pressed for an answer, she may have said 'Great Dane', or maybe 'Medium Sized Horse'.

Parker held the door open and pointed with her free hand. "Out," she ordered.

The dog whined and pawed at her leg, but she just pointed more resolutely. "Go on, go home."

It slunk out the door with more than one backwards glance, but Parker was not swayed. She closed the door heavily behind it. She checked each lock twice before she crawled back into bed.

Parker was grateful to find that her room was empty when the ringing phone woke her up the next morning, and Nate's voice implored her to HQ for the latest briefing.

She dressed quickly and tripped over the large dog-body sleeping blissfully, stretched out across the doorstep when she tried to leave.

The dog sat up and nudged her, making a 'pleased to see you' noise. Parker grumbled and rubbed at the elbow she'd banged when she went sprawling. "Go away," she told the dog. "I don't want a pet."

She thought about it a little more on her way to Nate's. A big, scary dog would make a great companion and would not hurt her peace of mind when it came to security, and that dog seemed to like her... But having a pet was far too much like being tied down to one place, which was something that Parker did not like at all.

Wide, begging yellow eyes watched her cross the street from the alley next to Nate's building. Parker glared back at them.

* * *

She was worried that she would have trouble focusing on whatever exciting new job Nate had lined up, thinking only of the strange events of the last few weeks, but thankfully, Nate and Hardison got into a tense little Cold War style argument about the proper approach to their next job, and the ensuing passive-aggressive snipes were entertaining enough that Parker forgot all about puppies and pearls.

"Just imagine this, Nate --"

"No, _you_ imagine --"

"Both of you, imagine shutting up," Sophie finally said, throwing up her hands. Parker snickered into her palm when Hardison and Nate stopped arguing immediately.

"Thank you," she sighed. "Now once more, Nate, what was your idea for getting into the mainframe?"

As Nate went over his idea again, Parker had the prickly feeling of being watched. The big dog was sitting on the fire escape, peering at her through the window with eyes roughly the size of saucers, begging and pleading.

While Hardison snorted and snarked through Nate's talk, Parker tried to shoo the animal away without drawing attention to either of them.

It didn't work.

"Parker?" Sophie said, peering over at her. "What's going on out there?"

Parker sat on her hands. "Nothing."

"Oh man... Is that..?" Eliot stood up fast enough to knock his chair back, and only finely honed reflexes allowed Parker to catch it before it hit the floor. He crossed to the window and Parker felt her stomach flip flop.

"Holy shit," Eliot muttered under his breath when he got to the window. "It is. It's a rose breasted grosbeak. He's adorable." He watched the little bird for a few moments until he became aware that everyone was staring at him.

"What?" he grunted, crossing his arms. "I'm allowed to have hobbies outside of punching and kicking. You know, this is so typical..." And Eliot went on, switching into full out rant mode. Parker saw the little pink and white bird through the window behind him.

As he started in on the part of the rant reserved for his contempt of _The Man_ , she watched the big dog appear over the edge of the windowsill very slowly, like a child pretending to come up in an invisible elevator. Parker glanced quickly around, but everyone else was watching Eliot's monologue with rapt attention. The dog peeked through the window, checking out everyone as if gauging its audience, then it reached out its long neck and snapped the little bird up in one mouthful and ducked back out of sight.

"So you can all just go right to hell," Eliot finished with a flourish. He turned back to the window to check on the grosbeak. Two pin feathers drifted mournfully past the window.

Hardison grinned. "You scared it off with all your crazy, man."

Eliot threw a pen at him, because he didn't have anything heavier to throw instead.

* * *

 _The Great Big Book of Death_ was either very funny -- if it was a joke -- or very creepy -- if it was meant to be taken truthfully.

Hardison had only been able to get through the first few pages on the first night, being so tired and still a little hungover from the previous night's binge drinking. But even with the knowledge of only a few pages, it still gave him a serious enough case of the deep down shiverin' willies that he put it in the freezer overnight.

The next few days were a whirlwind of electrical home repair, arguing with Nate and breaking into a chicken farm, which was emotionally scarring in so many ways. In the chaos that was his life, Hardison had forgotten the creepy children's book in the freezer.

But when he finally had a night free and went looking for something easily microwavable for dinner, it was there, and he figured he ought to get through it once and for all so he could get rid of it.

He sat down to read, eating as he went. It was probably crazy, but he thought maybe the pizza pocket he was eating tasted vaguely of evil, as if the book was leeching into it. He made a mental note to throw everything away and get a new freezer.

By the end of chapter three, he made a mental note to get an entirely new apartment after burning everything he owned. Maybe he would just move to a different city. Mumbai was supposedly lovely.

The book, as the title would lead a person to believe, was all about death. Or rather, it was about Death. The proper noun. Death with a capital D.

There wasn't an actual Death, not anymore, said the book. Not in the last few centuries. There was still death, of course, but it was largely self-regulating. The book indicated that the whole idea that Death was responsible for collecting the souls of the recently departed was actual fact, and, since Death was out of the picture, it was the responsibility of some unidentified group of people to collect these souls.

The book made no mention of how these people were selected, or what they did with the souls once they found them, or what a soul even looked like, but from what Hardison could piece together, the book was a manual, intended for these special soul collecting people.

And any and all lies he'd told himself to rationalize stealing mail from his friend, the book had been intended for Parker. So Parker collected souls now? Sure, she had a tendency to take things, and with the sheer number of things she picked up over the course of a month, he assumed that at one point or another she picked up things that belonged to people who were recently deceased, but he didn't think she had a safety deposit box full of souls.

It was all very weird. It was weird and unsettling and he didn't like it at all. He didn't like that someone thought that this stupid book or this stupid joke was something that Parker should be involved in.

Hardison stuck the book back in the freezer and went into his bedroom to watch a documentary about boats, to clear his head and because boats are awesome, but every so often he got up to check that the freezer was still firmly shut.

* * *

Five days of trying to avoid the dog and Parker's nerves were on edge. It followed her everywhere, no matter how creatively she tried to escape it.

She took an all-new route to the pub one evening, sprinkling cinnamon behind her to throw off her scent and jumping through the biggest puddles to confuse her big, slobbery tracker, but the dog was waiting by the door, smelling like a bakery and muddy up to its wrists (which on any normal sized dog would be its chest). She could quadruple lock the door, but it was sleeping at the foot of the bed when she woke up in the morning, snoring like a train.

There was even a small job the team took on, retrieving a stolen safety deposit box for a destitute young single mother, and while Parker crawled through a ventilation shaft, she could swear she heard the _tap tap tap_ of someone's nails on the metal. When the central air came on and the wind rushed by her, it smelled like wet dog.

"Leave. Me. Alone!" she shouted at the dog, when she could feel its eyes staring at her through the vinyl shower curtain late one night. She threw back the curtain and scowled at the beast, who was chewing the towel bar off the wall. Parker rescued her towel right before it disappeared down into what she could only assume was a bottomless pit.

The dog turned and wagged its tail excitedly, knocking the cabinet door clear off the bottom of the sink.

Parker sighed. It seemed like she didn't get a choice when it came to this beast being in her life, so she figured why bother fighting it anymore. "Sit?"

The dog sat instantly.

"Down?"

The dog lay down and stared at her, with very obvious 'am I making you happy?' eyes.

Parker nodded, half to the dog and half to herself. She patted his head and noticed then that his metal collar -- which he had been wearing since he showed up -- had a name carved into it. "Heller? Really?"

The dog barked happily and licked a few drops of water from her elbow.

Maybe it wouldn't be such a tragedy after all, she thought. The dog lay back down and chewed on the broken door while she stood, dripping and contemplating. Okay, maybe it wouldn't be a tragedy, but then again, maybe it would be.

* * *

After the fourth time Parker found and picked up one of those red light objects, she locked herself and Heller in her warehouse-house and spread the collection out on the trunk Parker kept at the end of her bed.

Other than the fact that they were glowing, there was nothing that Parker could see that connected any of them. There was the kitty cat keychain, a metal alarm clock that was missing the hour hand, an empty ceramic vase with little sakura blossoms painted on it, and a little round button that said 'I Voted Lampkin'... Aside from the necklace that Parker had already pawned, none of the things had any apparent value.

Heller tipped his head and stared between her and the things on the trunk.

"Don't eat them," Parker warned. She still wasn't convinced the red glowing things weren't irradiated. Not that that was likely to hurt him. Heller, she had learned in the last few days, could really eat anything. The bird and the cabinet door were just the beginning.

Since being officially invited into her life, Parker had watched Heller eat about fifty yards of climbing rope, a stack of back issues of National Geographic, three bottles of shampoo and their soapy contents, and the rear hubcaps off a parked car outside the Fourth National Bank. And those were just the highlights. He obviously wasn't a normal dog, but Parker really wasn't a normal girl. They got along very well.

In the middle of the twelfth night since Parker took in the dog, he woke her up with some very angry sounding growls and one low, menacing bark. She wrestled briefly with the sheets tangled around her, and, when she freed enough of her face, she realized her night light had burnt out. The entire expansive room that made up her home was in pitch darkness.

But as she looked around, she could tell it wasn't just darkness. It was something beyond darkness. It was metadarkness. It made her uncomfortable in the way that no human ever wanted to feel. It was like having someone run a cheese grater of horrid, skin prickling ickiness over all of her soul. Everything in her that was good and decent and obeyed the laws of nature rebelled at the feeling. (Parker broke a lot of laws in many countries, but she had great respect for the laws of nature.)

Something about the darkness was Not Right, with capital letters. Parker swallowed nervously on reflex and closed her hand around the flashlight she kept next to bed for emergencies. It didn't turn on, which furthered her belief that there was something evil around her. That's how evil always worked in the horror movies Hardison was so fond of.

Heller snarled again at something Parker couldn't see or hear and she shuddered at the sound. Something else snarled back, something that sounded like nothing else Parker had ever heard. Heller started to whine, low and defensive, and it got increasingly louder. Parker clutched at the blankets instinctively, pulling them over her feet like she used to when she was a young girl afraid of whatever was lurking under her bed.

The dog's whine broke off suddenly, and there was a split second of silence before Parker heard him jump. He collided with something in the air and they both hit the floor. Some sort of fight ensued, though Parker couldn't see it. It was the worst noise she had ever heard and it made her stomach turn.

Finally, the noise stopped and whatever the thing was that Heller had been fighting either disappeared or died. She could tell because the darkness lost its extra-dark, sinister feeling and was just dark instead.

The nightlight flickered back on and illuminated a small circle of floor. Once her eyes adjusted a little more, Parker could make out the outlines of most of her possessions strewn like they'd just been through an earthquake. She couldn't see Heller or even hear him panting.

"Heller?" She called out for him, but there was no big black dog to jump on the end of the bed and make the springs groan. There was no response at all.

She realized she was crying, she knew it was late, and she knew she had nothing to say that didn't sound actually crazy, but she called Eliot anyways. He picked up before the second ring.

Parker got two sentences out before he stopped her and told her to stay put because he was already on his way. She was thankful in ways she couldn't quite explain, but Eliot had already hung up so she didn't need to.

* * *

It slunk through the sewers, dripping a trail of viscous darkness behind it like blood. It hurt, and it didn't know it could even feel any more. The pain was bad, in the physical, where that monster dog had ripped it open, but it was good in the way that meant it was getting stronger. It could feel things now, real things, and that meant everything was going according to plan.

Mostly, the creature amended, because a big part of the plan had hinged on killing the gold headed girl before the sun came up again. She had been stupid enough to miss one of the souls, and the creature was very, very good at finding them. The soul had given it the power to take a shape, but the dog's attack had sapped that strength. It would need more souls if it was going to kill the girl. Some more souls and a way to get rid of the dog. That's all it needed. This run in with the beast and the failure to kill the girl were just set-backs.

It would use the last of the power from the lost soul to heal itself and creep out of the safe darkness of the sewer pipe to find another one. Then the plan would be back in action.

"Kuk kuk kuk," it chuckled to the rats and the slime, not having anyone else to share its joy with. The rats ran away and the slime wished it could. It tried to make itself unobtrusive and harmless looking instead, which was actually a pretty big feat by slime standards.

Under the streets and unknown to everyone on the surface, the little creature made of solidified darkness glided on with the sole purpose of destroying everything fixed firmly in its mind.

* * *

When she had gone to bed, the door was locked as tight as anything, but she wasn't surprised that it swung open without any trouble when Eliot arrived.

He flipped on the overheard lights and didn't react at all to the mess or the sticky pools of what seemed to be tar on the floor. Eliot crossed the room to her bed, where she was still holding the blankets protectively against herself, a little faster than someone who was being objective would have, which meant the 'not reacting at all' was his way of reacting. Parker would have thought that was kind of sweet, if she'd thought of it at all.

Just before Eliot was within range to be able to reach out and touch her, there came a low growl. Eliot stopped, and, before Parker could say a word of warning, Heller sprang at him, launching them both across the room.

Heller barked and Eliot swore, and the obvious sound of the dog's jaws snapping shut echoed off the far walls, which was scary and a bit like overkill, in Parker's opinion, given the square footage of the place. She'd seen him bite through one of those concrete parking curbs once, so she really didn't want to see what kind of mess he could make out of something as measly as a pathetic human ulna or a femur.

"Heller, no!"

Just as quickly as it had started, it stopped. Heller was still growling, but he wasn't trying to bite through bones and tendons and tissue anymore, so Parker counted it as a win.

"Parker," Eliot said with what little air he had left, considering the dog was slowly compressing him into a singularity. "What is this thing?"

"A dog, Eliot. Heller, come. Eliot's our friend. Heller! Here!"

The dog showed Eliot his big, shiny teeth one more time, then got off him and leapt onto Parker, licking the remains of her tears from her face and casting a few distrustful looks at Eliot. Eliot took a few moments to making sure all his parts were still attached and to relearn how to breath.

"What happened? Did the... did that do this?" he asked, once he was confident he hadn't been secretly murdered by the big, slavering colossus that Parker claimed was a dog.

Parker glanced around the room and realized that she'd been underestimating the damage done to the room. Everything she owned except her bed and her trunk had been destroyed in the unseen fight. "Oh," she breathed, taking in the sight. "No. No, Heller was protecting me."

Heller licked her face again and lay down across her feet and continued to stare at Eliot, like he was daring him to make another sudden move.

Eliot skipped past all the additional questions he had like 'but what is that thing actually' and 'where did it come from' and 'oh god, why are you letting it lick you' and kicked straight into protection mode. "From what?"

"I don't know."

He sighed. "So something came in here, destroyed everything but left you alone, and your... dog fought it off?"

Parker nodded and patted Heller's head. He rumbled happily and started chewing on the flashlight. Eliot watched the animal bite through the metal and shuddered just a little.

"And then you called me?"

Parker nodded again. She felt awful for multiple reasons, but she couldn't put words to any of them.

Standing in the middle of the destroyed room with his hands on his hips and still eyeing the dog like he thought it was a terrorist, Eliot felt as crazy as Parker looked at that moment. "Parker, unless you can give me something else to go on, I don't know what you want me to do."

Parker put her chin on her knees and felt the tears burning at the corners of her eyes again. She didn't know how to say that for the last month she'd been picking up randomly glowing objects and now her life was being turned more upside down than it had ever been before and something was obviously really messing with her and had tried to kill her and her ridiculously large dog once already tonight and she was too afraid to go back to sleep unless she knew there was someone watching over her. "I don't know either," she said finally.

Eliot let out an explosive sigh and started to say something, but changed his mind at the last second when he realized she was crying. "Go to sleep, Parker," he said irritably. "But tell your dog to not try and eat my arms again, okay?" He shook a ripped sweater out of the wreckage of Parker's belongings and used it to brush the debris and sticky, black sap stuff off the trunk at the end of the bed so he had somewhere to sit. He didn't even offer to turn the lights off, because he knew better.

"Goodnight, Eliot," Parker whispered.

* * *

"Oh, for the love of -- !" Eliot's shouts woke Parker up the next morning. Her heart was immediately pounding and her eyes flew open, expecting the preternatural darkness to be covering the room, but instead everything was brightly lit and normal looking.

More normal looking than the last time she'd looked, even. Most of the things that had been tossed onto the floor in the overnight chaos had been righted, cleaned off or otherwise fixed, like Eliot hadn't been able to sit still while on guard duty.

On the newly cleaned floor, Eliot and Heller were wrestling over something. Parker could tell Heller easily had the upper paw, but Eliot was not giving up without a struggle, which was admirable, if a little superfluous considering the dog was obviously toying with him.

"Just let him have it, Eliot," she advised.

"It's my fucking shoe!" he spat back, getting his knee under the Heller's chest. He pushed hard and the dog went sprawling onto the floor, but before Eliot could jump to his feet with the shoe triumphantly upheld like the symbolic trophy he wanted it to be, the dog was back on top of him with all four paws.

"No, damn, off!"

Heller had all but abandoned his attempt for the shoe and was now taking great pleasure in sucking on one of Eliot's braids, which made Parker laugh in spite of the weird few weeks she'd been having. "Give him the shoe, he's hungry."

"Are you crazy?"

Parker chose not to answer that particular question. "Heller," she called, getting the dog's attention before she pointed to a pile of too-broke-to-be-fixed things Eliot had piled by the door. He bounded over and started chewing on the choicest looking pieces.

"Dogs don't eat shoes," Eliot said, sitting up and smoothing rumpled dog prints from his shirt. "They... oh. Is he eating broken glass and thumb tacks?" Eliot held his shoe like it was his lifeline back to normality.

Parker shrugged. "I haven't found anything he _can't_ eat. He ate a propane tank last week and burped like a dragon for four days after."

"Parker..." Eliot thought very carefully about how he wanted to phrase his next few sentences, lest the dog hear him and decide thumb tacks weren't as delicious as previously imagined. "Are you sure it's safe to have that thing around?"

She looked for clothes that hadn't been destroyed and he turned around as she got dressed. "Of course it's safe," she told him. "Heller's a good boy, aren't you, Heller?"

Watching the dog eat the doorknob off the cracked bathroom door in one mouthful was among the least convincing things that could have supplemented Parker's position. Eliot tore his eyes away from that disturbing sight and gave Parker one of his best interrogation stares. "What is going on with you, Parker?"

She took a deep breath and didn't say anything at all. Just like the previous night, she had no idea what she was supposed to say. "I want eggs. Can we go get breakfast? And I'll call Hardison; there's that place near him that makes those great omelettes."

* * *

Hardison twirled his fork around in his fingers while they waited for the server to come back with their drinks. "I, uh... Not here to judge or anything, but any particular reason you two showed up together for breakfast?" He wasn't sure he meant the part about not judging them, especially Parker, but he was going to at least make the effort to lie to them. What are friends for, right?

Eliot rolled his eyes and snatched the fork from his hand. "Making me nervous, man. And yeah, there's a reason. Parker was about to explain to me what that reason actually is, but I guess she thought you'd like to hear it too."

Parker was sitting next to the window with Heller right outside, because that's the only seating configuration they could get away with to prevent the dog from sitting on the sidewalk outside and howling loud enough to rattle the glass and terrify half the city. Hardison hadn't noticed the dog yet. Parker was staring out the window, more as an excuse not to be engaged in the conversation than anything else.

"Parker?"

"I don't know what's wrong with me," she said suddenly, turning away from the window. She startled the waitress, who blushed furiously when she set down Parker's chocolate milk and took their orders as fast as humanly possible.

"I don't know what's wrong," Parker said again, in a much lower voice. "I... It's crazy." She clammed up. There were so many crackpot theories in her head, but the second she thought about saying any of them out loud, she realized how weird they really sounded. She glanced up at Hardison and Eliot, and they both looked so concerned, so worried, that she decided she didn't have a choice but to tell them. They were both obviously dependent on her to be the stable one.

"I think someone's trying to kill me or something," she confided, leaning closer. "I got shocked last week at Nate's, then something broke into my place last night and fought with Heller, and I've had the feeling that someone's been watching me for a couple weeks now... Oh!"

She remembered something out of the blue, and it suddenly felt very important. "There was a guy, last month. He said I took something that was his."

Eliot and Hardison traded a confused look. "Parker," Hardison said gently. "You take things from a lot of people."

"That's what I said!" she fluttered her hands in a way that was probably supposed to mean something. "His name was Paul. It was right after that job we had in Topham with that rich contractor guy and his dead wife."

"You think this guy is trying to kill you?" Eliot wasn't sure he followed, but he sure he wasn't pleased with it.

"I did take something, from that house," she said. "I think he knew, and I think he wants it."

"Parker," Eliot sighed. "How many times have we gone over this? No freelancing on a case."

"You'll have to give it back," Hardison told her. "If he wants it so bad he's following you, you either have to give it back or Eliot's going to have to go do his thing."

"'My thing'?"

"Well, I just meant --"

"You meant I gotta go and clean up yet another mess that you people made?"

"Oh, 'you people'? That's just racist."

"Shut up, Hardison, you know what I meant. And no, Parker, I am not doing 'my thing', so give the guy his whatever-it-was back."

Parker took a big mouthful of chocolate milk before she broke the bad news. "I don't have it anymore. It was a necklace, and it had this weird glow and I --"

She was cut off by Hardison spilling his water all over himself. "It what?"

Eliot and Parker both looked at him like he had sprouted an extra arm while they sat there. "I know it sounds crazy, but --"

"No," he cut her off again, leaning across the table to take both of her wrists in his hands. "Parker, you need to not be messing with me right now, because I'm getting old and I don't think my heart can take it, girl. Tell me _exactly_ what happened and don't leave anything out."

Parker explained how she'd found the necklace in the bathroom, how it had been glowing with a strange, red light, how she had met Paul the next night, and how he'd seemed to know something about it but hadn't really said much. She told them how she'd brought the necklace to a pawn shop and how the light had gone out when the owner's daughter put the necklace on.

"And now you think something's been watching you and something attacked you last night?"

Something about Hardison's intense interest nudged a few alarms bells for Eliot. "Hardison, what's going on?"

Parker started talking about the unnatural blackness and the fight and Heller at the same time Hardison started talking about evil-tasting hot pockets and creepy children's picture books. They seemed content enough to talk over each other, but Eliot stopped them.

"Whoa, whoa. Okay. Hardison first."

"I stole Parker's mail," he blurted out.

Parker was very impressed. "Basic, but still," she said, grinning up at the waitress when she brought their food. Parker felt better already from just having said her piece. She dove into her omelette. "Was it another jury summons? You can keep it."

Hardison took a deep breath and told Parker and Eliot about the book and the basic information it contained about Death and souls collection. As he spoke, the colour slowly drained out of Parker's face, and she lost all interest in her food.

"Okay, whoa. You actually expect us to believe that?" Eliot asked, finishing the last of his meal and leaning his chair back on two legs with his arms across his chest. "Hardison..."

"I know," Hardison sighed. "It's a stupid, messed-up joke. You should read the part where it talks about the big, scary hellhounds that are going to come to protect Death and Death's apprentices at the end of days."

Eliot did a strange, wiggling dance to keep himself from falling out of his precariously balanced chair. Parker wrapped her arms around herself, because she was sure the temperature in the diner had just dropped by fifteen degrees.

"What?"

When Parker didn't move or say anything, Eliot leaned over her and rapped on the window. Heller was on the glass immediately with paws the size of soup bowls and his big, pink tongue pressed against the window. There was a tense second where Eliot thought he was going to try and eat the window, but luckily it passed and the window remained intact.

"Wow," Hardison breathed. "And that's your hellhound, Parker?"

Parker nodded stiffly, her brain still trying to catch up with everything that had happened and everything Hardison had said.

"He's a... big dog. Have you named him yet? He needs a big dog name. Something fierce. Like Jaws or Spike or Arrow."

"Heller," Eliot told him. "She calls him Heller."

Hardison thought for a second. "Okay, not great, but it could be worse, I guess. Parker, you know what this means?"

"I think I'm going to throw up," she said, still hugging herself for warmth.

"It means we're going to go find this guy that thinks it's funny to mess with people like this and I'm going to throw him out a window," Eliot said, dropping a few bills on the table to cover their breakfast.

Parker gave Hardison a helpless look. He shrugged and got up, holding out his hand to her. "Come on, let's make sure Papa Wolf doesn't go overboard." She followed him, feeling very much like she'd missed out on the part where this was supposed to be funny.

* * *

Death was outside Paul's house that morning, in the way that Death can be anywhere Death wanted to be. Death peered through the kitchen window and wondered if anyone was home.

* * *

"Look, man, it's not that hard," Eliot said, stretching his legs out and getting comfortable. "Just answer my questions and then we'll get out of your hair."

Paul was taped to a chair in his kitchen with way more tape than was strictly necessary, in his opinion. Really, any amount of tape was overkill, Paul thought, because what the hell was the world coming to when people taped other people to chairs in their own homes? He was a pretty good guy and he didn't deserve any sort or amount of adhesive restraint and anyways, wasn't scratchy synthetic rope supposed to be the bondage device of choice for home invaders?

As if the tape wasn't enough, the very intimidating man had found a knife bigger than any knife Paul thought he owned and was making it look easy and fun to balance it on his fingertips.

A little voice in Paul's head chirped up _'don't try this at home, kids'_ in a way that would have made him laugh out loud if he had been a character in a movie, but, because it was real, just made him feel more nauseous.

"I said... I said I don't know what... what you're talking about." Paul was having trouble concentrating on which order his words were supposed to go in because the sharp edge of the knife kept catching the light and it was distracting.

Eliot sighed and set the knife down very carefully. "I know you're lying. She knows you're lying. Even he knows you're lying and he's terrible at this."

"Thanks," Hardison grimaced from where he was leaning on the fridge. Eliot inclined his head in acknowledgement.

"Let me tell you the best part, though, Paul -- can I call you 'Paul'? -- Paul, the best part. The best part is that if we were to open the door there, and let our fourth associate in... He would know you were lying, too." Eliot's wicked smile made something in Paul flip-flop. There was no way the fourth associate could be any scarier than the guy with the knife, and yet the small possibility that he may be wrong was enough to turn Paul's insides to jelly. He was pretty sure he was going to die. Soon. It was not the best feeling he'd ever experienced.

"Who are you and what are you playing at? Who are you working for? Why her?"

Paul looked over at Parker with a 'save me' expression, but she was looking at her shoes.

"I don't know what you mean, I wish I did. I _really_ wish I did. Because you're scary. But I swear, I don't know you're talking about."

Eliot fixed him with another hard stare, but Paul had nothing else to say. Eliot nodded ever so slightly, and Hardison nudged the back door open.

Hardison's revelation that the giant animal was supposed to be a hellhound was not exactly shocking, Eliot thought. He was more massive than any dog he'd ever seen, bigger than most of the Shetland ponies he'd grown up with, too, and the first time Heller had knocked him down there had definitely been something unnatural in his eyes. But when he took his first few tentative steps into the kitchen, he looked exactly like a big, awkward puppy who was sure he was about to get yelled at for being somewhere he wasn't supposed to be.

Paul's eyes went wide and he struggled against his restraints, but Eliot and Hardison were very good at tape bondage (Parker make a mental note never to ask).

"Go on," Eliot said, pointing at Paul. "Get him."

Heller cocked his head like a confused owl.

"Heller, go."

Paul stopped struggling and looked between Eliot and Heller. "Dysfunctional relationship, hmm? Have you tried offering him belly rubs?"

"Heller," Eliot said, his tone still calm and even. "He tried to hurt Parker."

To Paul's credit, he didn't wet himself when Heller leapt on him. The chair shattered under the force and they both sprawled in the wood shards. Heller's jaws snapped dangerously close to his neck and he felt drool hit his face. Paul squeezed his eyes shut and prayed he didn't get eaten or worse.

"I'm sorry! Oh god, I don't know how it happened, she shouldn't have been able to see it glowing unless she was one of us! I don't make those decisions, I had nothing to do with it, I just followed instructions!"

Parker cleared her throat and Heller climbed off of him, growling once more to make his point clear.

Eliot helped Paul to stand up, brushing the splintered chair off him. "That shouldn't have been so hard, Paul."

Paul nodded dismally and stared at the curtains over the sink. "I got the book four years ago and I was scared of it, but I felt it was real. I missed a one, maybe two, when I first started. It was so bad. Nightmares of my grandfather's ghost yelling at me for being so lazy almost every night, sometimes when I was awake. I was hearing voices in the sewers and walls, little hissing voices that weren't speaking words, but speaking hate and darkness, right into my soul. All the electrical wiring here blew out at the same time... The book says 'the forces of darkness' and I believe it. You read the book, right?"

Parker shrugged. "No. He took it. Said it made all his food taste evil."

"Fair enough," Paul shuddered.

"You never mentioned the forces of darkness," Eliot said blithely.

Hardison shrugged off-handedly. "You want me to tell you everything that happens in my life every day, man? I'm a busy guy."

"Yeah, I'm sure you are, but you'd think 'forces of darkness' would rank somewhere up near the top of pointless shit you tell us. I mean, last week you told us, in detail, about how the 'U' key was stuck on your netbook and you thought maybe there were toast crumbs under it. But forces of darkness never came up. That seem right to you?"

Paul turned to Parker. "We're not supposed to be talking to each other, you know. The book says that makes the forces angry."

"What does that even mean, 'forces of darkness'? Like ghosts or something? Do they have a tiger? That would be scary..."

Paul didn't know. "I don't really want to find out though," he told her. "Just get a day planner or something, and the names will show up. Then you just find the object before anyone else does, and everything will work out."

"But why? How?"

"I don't have those answers for you. It's just how it works."

Parker stroked Heller's head absently while she thought about everything that had been going on. "I don't like them," she said quietly.

"Well, I don't like them either," Paul said. "I think the white guy's got major unresolved anger problems. Maybe his mother didn't hug him enough." Hardison and Eliot continued to bicker in the background, not realizing they were suddenly the topic of conversation.

Parker rolled her eyes. "Obviously, but I meant the red glowing things."

"The souls?"

"Don't call them that." Parker's hand curled between Heller's floppy ears protectively, like if Paul spoke too loudly he would upset the dog.

"That's what they are, though. That's what makes them glow. I don't like them either; they're sort of freaky, right? That's why I'm glad we don't keep them."

"... We don't?" The thought of putting in the effort of tracking down and stealing one particular item and not keeping it was more than a little off-putting.

"No, not at all. God, no that would be one of the worst things you could do, really. They have to be passed on. Like... Okay, I work at a thrift store, part time, right? So when I pick up the souls, I bring a couple to the thrift store and mix them in with the other stuff. Someone comes along, buys one, boom, they got themselves a new soul." He sighed when he saw her blank, uncomprehending look.

"Not everyone has a soul, you know. Some people are empty, waiting for the right one to come along. And that's where we help. We pass along the souls so they can find the right home. Think of it as cosmic recycling."

Parker wasn't entirely sure she was still following, but if she could get rid of the freaky glowing soul objects, she was going to. ASAP. "Wait," she said, something clicking into place on a different level. "Why would keeping them be the worst thing?"

"Forces of darkness. All they want is to get the souls, but if they get them, they destroy them and use the power to make themselves strong and then kill all humans or something. The book is kind of vague about most things, but it's abundantly clear on the forces of darkness destroying the world." Paul toyed with the sleeve of his shirt and tried to change the subject. "Do they always fight like that?"

But Parker didn't answer him because she was already out the door.

"Parker! Parker, hey!"

Hardison and Eliot jogged to catch up with her, meeting her just before the fence. Paul hung back in the doorway, unsure whether he wanted to find out what was going on or if he should just run back inside and hide under his bed.

"I shouldn't have left my place," she said, very upset. "There's souls there."

"... What?"

"Souls!" she said again, more agitated. "Paul said that the book said that the forces of darkness would do everything they could to get to the souls, and we just left them there alone!" Heller wound his way between the mess of legs and grumbled deep in his chest.

Eliot ran his hands through his hair and took a deep, calming breath. "Parker... Parker, you don't actually believe this is real, do you?"

"I have to go. Now." What she was planning on doing if she found personified darkness rummaging through her things was not exactly clear, but she ran as if the hounds of Hell were at her heels (they weren't; Heller was half a block ahead of her).

Eliot thought she was having some sort of psychotic break; Hardison wasn't sure what he thought at the moment, but he was sure that Parker thought it was real. Either way, they followed her as she ran back through the city streets to her warehouse-house. They got to the door just as she was unlocking it. When she threw it open, it was pitch black inside.

No, it was darker than that. It was the strange, supernatural darkness from the night before that filled the large room.

Hardison kicked the door open a little wider, and the darkness shrank around the edges, pulling away from the light spilling in from outside. He felt his skin crawl when he saw it. It wasn't like what happened when he got up in the middle of the night for a glass of water and fumbled around in the darkness until he managed to pull the fridge open. Because the light from the fridge just made it not-dark anymore. Nothing happened to the darkness then, it was just not there because it was light. This darkness, it moved like an actual thing; like poking a millipede and watching it scuttle away from you. He shuddered.

Before she could go charging headfirst into whatever it was, Hardison and Eliot each grabbed her by an arm and hauled her back.

"You have no idea what that even is," Hardison said.

Eliot still wasn't buying the forces of darkness theory. "Anyone could be in there. You two stay here." When Parker struggled to get free, he shoved her none too gently into Hardison's arms.

"I don't care, you hang onto her. Parker!" he snapped over her attempted protest. "Let me do my job."

He was gone again before anyone could try to stop him. Once Eliot was a few steps into the room, he disappeared completely from sight. Not an outline or even a hint of movement was visible. Heller whined and pawed at the door, but he didn't follow. Instead he ran around the corner of the building and out of sight.

Parker struggled against Hardison for a moment, then sagged against him in defeat. "Something bad is going to happen," she muttered, hiding her eyes. Hardison stroked her hair, trying to be reassuring, but his stomach was doing figure eights, and he was pretty sure she was right.

* * *

He could smell them. The putrid human smell clung to them. It was almost as bad as the smell that the still-breathing humans produced. The souls were close.

At least the sparkly souls were quiet. The noise! Oh, the noise that humans made. Even deep in the sewers, he could hear them above, screeching and screaming and bleating and living.

He turned around on himself, settling and waiting for the people on the other side of the wall to leave. Once the golden-haired meat-bag was gone, with the other one and the dog, he could come out of hiding and fetch the souls. They were talking and their voices felt like rough sand scraping against him. He bristled.

And he had been a 'he' for a few days now, and he revelled in his shape. It had been so long since he had a shape, he felt maybe he was abusing it. He ran his hands down his new sides and felt the last remaining trickle of power through his veins. He needed the other souls soon. Already, his strong shape was becoming soft around the edges. Soon, the humans would be gone and soon, the souls would be his.

He touched his scales, counting the sharp edges and savouring the painful sting when they cut in deeply. In the dark that oozed from his pores, he waited.

* * *

"Okay, let's do this the easy way," Eliot said to whoever was lurking in the darkness. "First, I'm going to kick your ass for making my life so difficult. Then I'm going to go get coffee, because I think I've fucking earned it."

There was a slight shifting noise, and Eliot knew he wasn't alone. "Look," he sighed, rolling his shoulders. "I'm not playing games here."

He took another few steps into the dark, unable to see, but on red alert. There was the barest hint of a chuckle from just beyond his elbow. Eliot started to turn, but whoever it was caught him with a quick arm up and under his ribcage, sending him flying through the dark. Eliot hit the floor and was back on his feet within seconds, but, after a moment he figured he would have been better off staying down, because that's where he ended up again with the person on top of him.

"Damn," Eliot grunted, moving to shove the other body off. There was a sudden change, something shifted or maybe Eliot just thought it did, but he was suddenly, acutely aware that whatever the thing was that was on top of him, it sure as hell wasn't a person.

Eliot was a pragmatic guy. He didn't buy into superstition or magic or mysticism or anything like that. He'd broken more than a few mirrors in his time, and his luck was never worse than usual. He sure as hell didn't believe in ghosts or monsters. Eliot was concerned with real things that affected him daily. Food, shelter, people attacking him with knives or shower curtain rods -- those were the things he worried about. Werewolves eating his face or black cats crossing his path were relatively low on the list of things that scared him, because he didn't believe in them.

But this was more real than anything in his recent memory, and it was not any animal he recognized and it sure as hell wasn't human. The instinct part of Eliot's mind, the primal, fight or flight, caveman part, panicked.

Eliot shoved up as hard as he could with his forearms, trying to get enough space between him and whatever it was to reach down and find one of the multiple knives he had on his person, but the thing gave no ground.

There was a change in the kind of darkness, he noticed, around the edges of thing. It seemed to be made from darkness, a creature of vaguely humanoid shape, but with a very super-human strength. "What...?" Eliot started.

"Shh, hush now, human," the thing whispered in his ear with hot, dank, garbage breath that immediately put Eliot in mind of corpses and stagnant air. He shuddered involuntary, trying once more to shift the thing even an inch. It laughed, a sound somehow worse than its breath, like skeletal rats skittering across his bones. "Don't struggle, you'll ruin the fun."

Anything that could possibly be counted as 'fun' to this thing was something Eliot wanted to be actual miles away from. Since jumping up, grabbing his friends, and running until they hit Nicaragua was not an option with the creature on top of him, he opted instead to struggle like a litter of kittens in a paper sack. If he wasn't having fun, neither was the monster made of darkness that wanted to kill him, or eat him, or worse.

The creature either thought its raspy, creaky monster voice was scarier than it actually was (Eliot thought he sounded a little like a rejected Muppet) or maybe it thought Eliot was a little brain-dead, because it clearly wasn't expecting Eliot to continue struggling.

It slipped, just slightly, just enough for Eliot to tighten his hand around the hilt of the knife at the small of his back. In spite of everything in him still screaming revulsion, horror, and a sense of impending emotional crisis after realizing that his neatly crafted, pragmatic, and ultimately _realistic_ world view was inherently wrong, Eliot felt a little spark of relief.

Bad move.

The creature was made of darkness, it lived in darkness, and, when it breathed, it exhaled darkness all around it. It drew power and comfort from the darkness, suckled at its teat and made love to its soft corners. Any spark, even a metaphorical one, was the worst kind of personal attack.

When it came time to write this encounter in the annals of history, there would be debate for centuries. Was it a good thing or was it a bad thing? In that moment, Eliot had not a single question in his mind that future historians could take a flying leap because it was bad thing with a capital 'Oh Shit, Why'.

The creature hammered a closed fist down on Eliot's wrist, shattering the bones. The knife spun out of his hand. The monster poised above him, and then, all of the sudden, there was sharp, smooth pain, like an ice pick straight through Eliot's heart.

Eliot had definitely stabbed a few people in his time. More than a few. Maybe even a flock. But every time he had to stab someone, there had been resistance when the blade went in. He felt like he was made of Play Doh for all the difficulty the monster had spearing him with... whatever it was. There was no blood, none of the shredding, ripping feelings he'd associated with stab wounds in past.

All of these thoughts flew through Eliot's mind in the split second as it happened, though, because for the rest of the seconds after it happened, until he passed out from the pain, his only thought was 'this is going to end badly.'

The saddest part was that he wasn't even around to feel vindicated when he turned out to be right. The dark creature slid away, taking with it the four soul objects from Parker's smashed open trunk, Eliot's knife, and a very smug feeling of superiority.

Alone in the dark, Eliot died.


	2. Part Two

Death was there and Death saw, in the way that Death can see anything and everything if that's what Death wants to see. Death didn't feel things, but Death imagined other people might feel sad.

* * *

"How long has it been?"

Hardison checked his watch. "Since he went in or since you last asked?"

"Either."

"Sixty four seconds since he went in, nine since you last asked me."

Just as Parker started to say something, the tone of the darkness in the room changed. It was still dark, but it wasn't the scary, preternatural darkness. She ran in blindly, with Hardison right behind her, flipping on the overhead lights.

They blinked with the sudden invasion of light, but soon the dark, swimming spots cleared and they saw Eliot heaped on the floor. Someone screamed (no official decision on who) and Hardison and Parker both rushed over to him.

Parker called 9-1-1 while Hardison checked for a pulse. He wasn't entirely sure how he was supposed to be doing it, but he tried anyways. "Parker, he's not breathing."

"Hurry," Parker snapped into the phone.

"Should we do CPR? How do you do CPR? Oh, dammit, Eliot, wake up, you're the one who knows this stuff." Hardison sounded like he was in the messy process of losing his mind. Parker got down on the floor next to him and tried desperately not to look at Eliot.

"I don't know, Hardison, I never learned CPR."

"No, no, no," Hardison muttered, shaking Eliot roughly by the shoulder again. Parker laid her hand across his arm, half to steady him and half to steady herself.

Parker's stomach butterflies were doing loops and circles, and she felt like she was going to be sick. They waited in silence as the ambulance sirens got louder. "This is my fault," she whispered.

"Parker... no. Just... Come here." Hardison was still shaking, but he took her hand and they got out of the way of the paramedics when they showed up. Neither one of them noticed the broken trunk and the missing souls.

* * *

"Move," the creature with the hissing voice said, drawing himself up and fluffing out his sides.

Heller stood his ground.

"Move! I killed him, and I'll kill you too, beast."

The dog glared. The rumbling growl started in the very centre of him, and, by the time it had reached his mouth, it had gathered enough strength to knock the monster backwards a few stumbling steps.

The darkness around them swirled angrily, tied to its master's mood. A person, or even any normal animal, would have been absolutely blind in this level of darkness, but Heller saw the shrivelled little thing for what it was.

Finally fed up and eager to get back underground, the darkness creature tried to duck under him without dropping any of his treasures, but he didn't make it all the way free of the enormous dog. Heller grabbed the monster by the ankle and yanked him up.

The creature screeched but hung onto the souls. Heller shook him twice, and the monster thought briefly about taking the power from another one to get away, but the next part of the plan couldn't go forward if he used them now. Just as it seemed like he had no choice if he wanted to get away, Heller made the decision for him by pulling off his leg.

He hit the ground and slithered right into the closest sewer grate, chuckling laugh echoing off the old stone and blood thicker and blacker than tar trailing after him. Heller growled and trotted off with the sticky black leg drooping from his mouth.

* * *

"Oh my god, what's going on?" Sophie said, high heels slipping slightly on the tile floor in the emergency waiting room as she dodged an intern to get to Parker.

"It was... It's..." Parker sighed. "Not here, okay?"

"But what the hell happened?"

Parker looked helplessly at Hardison who was a lot calmer now that they were in the emotionless, sterile hospital. It's exactly where Parker was starting to break down.

"Not sure exactly what happened, Soph. The paramedics revived him en route to the hospital, and he's apparently okay now, but they have no idea what's going on."

"Eliot?" Nate said, looking perplexed.

"Yeah."

"What was he doing? Where are the doctors? No, never mind." Nate was quiet for a moment. No one interrupted him while he thought. "Hardison, go in there, find out what exactly is going on. Find out if he's... how he's... You know."

"Yeah," Hardison breathed.

"We'll be right here," Nate said, pointing Sophie and Parker down into uncomfortable plastic chairs.

"I'll be right back." Hardison breezed through the swinging doors like he owned the place.

Nate sat between Parker and Sophie and they waited.

It seemed like they waited for hours, though it couldn't have been more than thirty minutes. They waited for any news at all, hoping for anything other than 'absolutely terrible', but expecting the 'worse than absolutely terrible'. And they were so focused on trying not to focus, no one thought to peek outside the glass doors, where they would have seen a dark fog creeping across the ambulance bay.

"How did this happen, Parker?" Sophie asked quietly once they determined Hardison was about to get thrown back out on his ass.

"It's so, so complicated," Parker sighed. "I don't know where to start."

"The beginning?" Nate honestly wasn't trying to be a smart ass. He knew Parker had a tendency to get way off-topic when she tried to talk about something she was uncomfortable with. Not that she was usually straight and to the point.

"Crooked contractor job in Topham last month. I picked up a necklace. Hardison stole a book out of the mail. Eliot fought with the shadow thing, and then he was dead. I don't know where Heller went." Parker pulled her feet up on the edge of the chair and hugged her legs.

"Dead? Oh god." Sophie pressed her hand to her heart and the tears sprang into her eyes immediately. Nate sat back in his chair and looked at the wall.

Parker pressed her face into her knees when her own tears threatened to start. "It's my fault. This whole thing. I shouldn't have touched that necklace."

"Parker, there's no way this is remotely your fault. In fact, I don't think --"

"He's okay. Eliot's okay. I mean, he's not okay, 'cause he was dead. But he's not anymore." Not even the burly security guard holding him two inches off the ground by the back of his obviously stolen scrubs was able to erase Hardison's grin.

"Oh..." Sophie breathed, taking her hand from her chest and wiping her eyes. "I can't handle this."

"'Authorized personnel only' means _authorized personnel only_ ," the security guard told them all sternly. "I understand you're worried about your friend, but the doctors will let you know as soon as possible. Stay here until then." He dropped Hardison on the floor and walked away.

"The EMTs revived him. They're thinking myocardial infarction, but... how does that even make sense? There's barely any scratches on him. Not new ones, anyways. Apparently he's dehydrated, too. But, they think he's going to be okay."

"You came in with John Francis?" It took Parker a moment to remember the fake name in Eliot's wallet.

"Yes. Yes, we did."

The nurse in the Flintstone's scrubs smiled that sweet, sorry, nurse smile that always made Nate's stomach twist at some wished-he-could-forget memories. "Okay, we're running a few more tests, but you can go in and see him for a few minutes. I'm sure he'd like that."

They followed her up the hall, and all tried not to trip of each other when she stopped short in front of a door.

"I'll just warn you now, we're still trying to determine the cause of the incident and he's... well, he's not exactly cheery about the whole thing. That's why the Doctor thought he might respond a little better if you visited with him for a few minutes. Tell him it's not the end of the world."

'Not exactly cheery' actually sounded a lot like Eliot, but then 'not the end of the world' thing was not something Parker was sure she agreed with. Maybe it was the end of the world. The events of the day weren't really comforting her against that thought.

The nurse showed them into the little room and half-closed the door behind them, reminding them she'd be back in a few minutes.

"Eliot?" Sophie said tentatively, edging around Nate towards the bed.

The overhead lights were off. With the small amount of light coming through from the hall, shadows played all around the room and made Parker and Hardison feel a little uneasy.

Hardison couldn't imagine Eliot wanted to sit around in the dark after what had happened any more than he did. "Do you want me to turn the light on?" he asked, really, really hoping the answer was 'yes'.

The shadowy figure leaning back in the bed that was probably Eliot shrugged.

Hardison flipped on the overhead light. It took a few seconds for everyone's vision to clear, but when they could see again, Sophie gasped aloud.

"Hmpf," Eliot sighed.

"Your eyes!" She reached out to touch him, but stopped right before contact. "Oh, Eliot."

"So," Nate said, choosing to gloss right over the unsettling sight of Eliot carefully regarding them when he clearly couldn't see through jet black eyes. "You were dead. How was that?"

He actually drew a chuckle from Eliot, surprising to everyone except maybe Nate, who remained impassive.

"Not bad," Eliot said. His voice was as thin and crackly as an onion skin, but he was alive and talking and that was more than anyone had been prepared to give him half an hour ago. "M'okay, Soph," he assured her. Even if he couldn't see her; her nervous energy was filling the small room.

"Right, okay then. They want to keep you for more tests, presumably to figure out what exactly is going on and if you're going to drop dead again. So while you get some rest, we're going to try and piece together our own version. Parker has a very long story to tell us, but I'm guessing you knew that." There didn't seem to be any accusation in Nate's voice, but Parker and Hardison traded a bit of a guilty look anyways.

"Any idea what attacked you? Because even an idea is more than we have right now."

Eliot sat silently for a few moments before he shook his head suddenly, shaking off the thoughts. "Uh, I can't really... I mean, I didn't see anything." He laughed again, completely humourless. "Whatever it was, it wasn't human. It was like it was made of the darkness in the room or something."

"Do they know what caused your eyes to... do that?"

Parker had barely looked at him the entire time they'd been in the room, because she had a feeling she couldn't exactly name. It felt like guilt, but it was tinged over with something else. She didn't like it. She looked up at him then and his eyes were black and clouded over, almost like when he was attacked, a little of the darkness crawled up inside of him and was starting to show through. Parker knew he couldn't see, but she felt, crazily, that maybe he still could. He was Eliot, after all, and he was staring right at her like he could read her thoughts. She would never put it past him.

Eliot shook his head again, wincing a little.

"Excuse me," said a nurse, pushing open the door and wedging herself into the room around everyone. "Need to get in here." She hung another bag on the IV pole next to the bed and fiddling with a few tubes and needles.

"It's time for Mister Francis to get some rest," the nurse said, pausing in the doorway and smiling that half smile nurses were apparently mandated to take a course in. "Visiting hours begin again at 10 am tomorrow."

"We'll see you tomorrow, uh, John," Nate said, smiling tightly even though Eliot couldn't see him exactly.

"Try to get some rest," Hardison added, smiling genuinely because he was just so grateful everyone was still alive. Or alive again, anyway.

"Yeah," Eliot muttered.

* * *

Back in Nate's apartment, Sophie made tea and Hardison ordered Indian food. Nate and Parker got comfortable on the couch. They both had the feeling that it was going to be a long night.

"I know you're stressed out, Parker, you've been stressed for a couple weeks now. But whatever this is, we'll all get through it. We always do."

Sophie brought over the tea. She pressed mugs into Parker and Nate's hands and tried to find the right words to say. It wasn't easy, mostly because she had no idea what was even going on.

"Alright, I think we should start with the book." Hardison said, touching Parker's shoulder. "All yours."

"What book?" Nate asked, cocking his head and trying to get a look at the cover.

"'The Great Big Book of Death'," Hardison said, sliding down the back of the couch and landing between Nate and Parker. "It's no Lord of the Rings, but definitely better than The Hunger Games."

"'So Now You're Death'? What is this?"

For the second time that day, Parker started the story of finding the strange pearl necklace. She got interrupted right around the part where Heller followed her for a week when the delivery girl knocked.

As Hardison scrawled a big, fake signature at the bottom of the receipt, Heller slunk through the door under the delivery girl's arm.

"Hey whoa whoa whoa!" she said, jumping back. "That your dog? He's a giant! And what's that he's got in his mouth?"

Hardison patted Heller on the head as he went by. He really didn't want to know what he had in his mouth. "Uh, I'll have to look into that. Thanks, have a great night!"

"Okay, so we have our creepy book thing, our creepy dog thing, and our delicious, I'm-praying-to-every-god-I-can-think-of-not-creepy dinner. I think we're ready to really delve into this. Get all messy with the details. Suss out the -- oh my sweet, dear, why? What the actual hell has your freaky dog got in his mouth, Parker?"

Heller gave Hardison a pointed look, which was a feat for a dog, and made Hardison take a small step back.

"It's... Hmm." Of course, unrattle-able Nate was the one to poke the limp, hanging thing in Heller's mouth first. "It looks like a frog's leg. But blacker."

Sophie was refusing to let her mind move on to severed legs when it still hadn't fully processed the dog's arrival. "So this is Heller? He's... big. Very big."

"Too big," Hardison said, skirting carefully around the dog to set their dinner on the table.

Parker shrugged at both of them. "I said he was big, didn't I?"

"Well then, maybe big is not the right term. Maybe gigantic?" Sophie said, just striving for literary correctness.

"Huge?" Hardison started opening the take out containers and spreading them over the coffee table.

"Enormous?" Sophie tried.

"Fuck-off big?"

Sophie paused with her fork hovering over the container of pork vindaloo. "'Fuck-off' is not really a modifier for 'big', Hardison."

"I still think it fits."

"Okay, okay." Parker felt like she was in the middle of an argument from a Mensa-funded preschool. "He's very large. Moving on. Pass the naan."

Nate refused to let anyone eat in peace, though. He pried the leg from Heller's mouth and held it gingerly between his fingers. "Look at this leg though," he said. It dripped a single drop of thick, black something onto the table.

"Aw, ew, come on! We're eating here!" Hardison had never considered himself to be squeamish, but he had very little tolerance for gross things while there was food present, especially after all the food at his place had started tasting like eldritch horrors.

"Sorry," Nate said, feeling very little remorse. "What do you think this is made of?"

"Well, considering the fact that it's goo-ing up the table? Flesh and bones and blood and stuff. Can you put it down and wash your hands five hundred times now?"

Nate was as adamant as Hardison was irritated. "But what does it _look like_ it's made of?"

"It sort of has scales," Parker said, leaning in and squinting. "But it's so dark, it's hard to... Oh."

"Oh?" Hardison squinted too, to see if he could see the 'oh'.

Sophie put it together, but then wished she hadn't. "You think this could be a leg off whatever attacked Eliot?"

Hardison shook his head. "No way. What is it that it can go chill without it's leg? How many legs does it have?"

"Maybe it's dead somewhere," Nate said, setting the leg down carefully on the floor (away from the food so Hardison didn't explode). Heller immediately lay down on top of it like a dragon protecting his hoard. Of legs.

"Not a chance," Hardison said, shaking his head again. "If it were dead, he would have brought us the entire thing. Look at that thing. The level of cute is directly proportional to the level of crazy. I can make you a graph if you get me some markers."

"He's right," Parker said around a mouthful of food. "He can draw lots of things with markers."

Hardison rolled his eyes, but decided to take that as meaning that yeah, he was awesome. "So, Eliot says it looked like it was made of living darkness, Heller brought us a leg that looks kind of like it came off a scaly frog, and we know whatever it is can cause heart attacks and the black, demon-looking eyes of vision loss. Oh, and it wants souls and can go on without a limb. That seems specific enough that I should be able to figure out what we're dealing with."

"How do you know it wants souls?" Nate asked, finally helping himself to dinner.

"Oh. Right." Parker relayed the previous day's events, starting with her panicked call to Eliot and ending with leaving Paul's place. She glossed over some of the exact details about how they got the information from Paul to begin with. Eliot had done enough for her that she didn't want to implicate him if she could help it.

"Some guy says 'forces of darkness' and we all jump right on board with that? Did we research this guy?"

Hardison waved his phone. "Yep, came out clean. Besides, a lot of what he said was in the book too."

"Index," Sophie said, flipping the book open. "You wouldn't have expected Death's book to have an index. It's almost like he knew we'd be in a hurry to get to research."

"I'd thank Death's editor, if I were you," Hardison joked.

"I think we can safely say this is not going to end well if we don't intervene," Sophie said slowly, all joking suddenly aside. She turned the book around so everyone could see the full page illustration she had just found.

The top half of the page looked like a child scribbled over it with black wax crayons. It was just a big, swirling mass of thick black lines. As the black tapered off towards the middle of the page, the gleefully insane artist had drawn stacks of the same little cartoon bodies that graced the front of the book, all dead with missing limbs, eyeballs gouged out and entrails becoming ex-trails. But, besides the implication that everyone would be very dead and mostly dismembered, all scattered among the piles of cartoon corpses were the most inexplicably well detailed monsters, with distended jaws opening wide to swallow pieces of the dead, bulging eyes, twisted bodies, claws, wings, fangs, dripping venom and everything and anything else terrifying and completely stomach-turning. Where the rest of the book was cartoony and brightly coloured (the chapter dividers were happy skulls with smiling daisies for eyes, for god's sake), this picture was dark and monochromatic and upsettingly realistic in its horror. Maybe it was just the contents of the picture, but the whole thing gave out chills and goose bumps like party favours.

"I, uh. I don't remember seeing that picture before," Hardison said, unconsciously taking Parker's hand.

"Well, I'm just showing you now," Sophie said, closing over the book.

"No, I mean, I've read through this book probably three times, cover to cover. That was not in there before. What chapter is that?"

Sophie flipped back a few pages. "It's called, um... oh, no."

"Oh no?"

"It's called 'Why You Can't Screw This Up, Parker.'"

There were a few seconds of silence and then Parker pulled her hand from Hardison's and ran out of the room.

They all looked at each other, unsure of what to do and feeling helpless.

"Alright," Nate said after a long moment. "I'm going to talk to Parker. Hardison, you try and figure out what exactly we're dealing with as far as forces of darkness go. Anything you can get us would be good. Sophie, you --"

"I'm going to help him. Two heads are better than one, even if one of them is Hardison. I know how to read, Nate, I might actually be good at research."

"Good, okay." Nate stood up and glanced at the food. "Is anyone else even remotely still hungry?"

Sophie and Hardison both shook their heads. Sophie even looked a little ill.

"Okay. Then Heller? Your job is to clean all this up."

* * *

"Parker?"

"I don't want to talk," she sighed, pressing her face into her arms.

"I don't want you to talk. I want you to listen," Nate said. He hung over the railing of the fire escape and looked up. Her voice was coming from over the lip at the edge of the roof, but he wasn't sure how she got up there except that 'she's Parker' which was not helpful if he also wanted to get up there.

"I'm not coming down."

"It's okay, I'm coming up."

His shoes slipped a little on the railing when he climbed up on it, so he got down quickly and took them off, throwing them back through the window and earning strange looks from Sophie and Hardison at the counter.

"... Fine," said Parker's disembodied voice.

Nate pulled himself over the top of the railing and started to climb. It was only one more floor and then over the concrete ledge, but it seemed like miles.

"Nate?"

He didn't reply because he was focused on not plunging four storeys to his death.

"Nate?" Parker said again, sounding a little more frantic. Her worried face appeared over the edge a few feet above him, framed in blonde hair.

"Almost there," he assured her, feeling for a sturdy place to put his foot so he could make a grab for the edge of the roof. "Aha!" He pulled himself onto the roof and lay there for a moment, pretty damn proud he'd made it without being injured.

"Nate?" Parker said, nudging him with her foot. "You know that door marked 'emergency exit and roof access' at the end of the hall next to the elevator? 'Roof access' means stairs, usually." She pointed to the door a few feet away, still standing open.

"...Good to know," he muttered. Nate sat up and shook the dust off.

"So," he started, not wanting to waste time when time seemed to be in very short supply. "I'm still not one hundred percent I understand what's going on. Between you and the souls and the dog and now Eliot... Obviously whatever's going on isn't really like anything we've dealt with before."

Parker hid her face and tried to force down the bitter bile taste in the back of her throat.

"I don't even know where to start," Nate chuckled dryly. He wrapped one arm around her shoulder and wondered briefly if maybe he should have let Sophie do this heart-to-heart, but then Parker started to cry into his jacket. Something in him that he thought he had lost years before switched on and Nate soldiered on through hostile, emotional territory.

"And, I mean, whatever this is, we can't let it beat us. Does that sound like us at all? We're ignoring the fact that Eliot died because he's ignoring it. We're not going to blame you for this even though something out there obviously wants us to. We're family, Parker.

"So the forces of darkness want to kill us all? Fine, we'll let them try. Parker, this is not the end of the world. We won't let it be. I have things to do and I'm not going to let a one-legged scaly frog monster tell me those things aren't important. I want to see the pyramids. I've never been on the Maid of the Mist. You've got things to do too, don't you?"

Parker nodded and tried not to wipe snot on Nate's lapel. "Bunnies."

"You... bunnies?"

"I always wanted a pet bunny."

"Well, come on then! Let's get downstairs and help the research twins figure out what's going on so we can stop it."

"But... What if this is bigger than we thought?"

"Isn't everything?"

"I'm not being philosophical, Nate," she sighed. She slid the book out from wherever it was Parker hid things on her person. "The book has a chapter on the Illuminatus. That's like... Big Death. Capital-D Death. They say Death commands the hounds of hell, that Death can give the gift of death with a single word. That Death will come and pass final judgement when the days of darkness are upon the world."

Nate shrugged. "So? Let him judge."

"What if...? I mean, the girl who got hit by the bus... I was right there. And Heller does whatever I tell him to. And the book said that all that bad monster stuff would happen if I screwed up. Nate... What if I'm _Death?_ "

He looked at her for a moment. "Oh. I didn't think of that. Well, if that's the case then... we should still help Hardison and Sophie figure out what's going on so we can stop it."

In the weak, orange rays of a weary sun, which had been blocked out by creeping, dark shadows all over the city for the better part of the day, Parker threw her arms around Nate's neck and hugged him tight. "Thanks," she whispered.

Nate patted her awkwardly for a moment, then relaxed into it and hugged her back.

"Come on," he said after a moment, very sure he wanted to take the stairs this time. "Let's do this. For your bunnies."

As far as catchy, fear-inducing battle cries went, it wasn't the best. It probably wouldn't even win a contest for 'halfway decent tag lines for B movies', but something about it resonated with Parker.

"Yeah, for bunnies."

* * *

Death thought little bunnies were quite nice as well.

* * *

"Find anything yet?" Nate asked when they got back to the apartment.

Hardison looked up, startled. "Well, maybe, but --"

"No 'but's, tell us what you've got."

"Nate, I really think this 'but' is --"

"No, Sophie, I don't want any distractions tonight, we need to get some serious information so we can ahead of this thing."

"Well, I think we should --"

"Hardison! Just tell me what you know."

"No, but Nate," Parker said, tugging his jacket sleeve like an impatient child. "Look."

Eliot crossed his arms over his chest. "Okay, can we all avoid shouting things like 'look' and 'see' unless it's strictly necessary? I feel like I'm getting left out of something." It was a weak attempt at levity, but it stopped anyone from asking too many questions right away.

"Eliot --" Nate started.

"No, not having a conversation about it. What are you guys working on? It seems interesting."

Hardison looked between him and Nate. "Uh…"

"Hardison, come on. I'm giving you carte blanche to talk to me about anything in the world and I'll even pretend to be interested. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity for you, man."

"We're trying to figure out what attacked you and what's been messing with Parker," Hardison said, still looking strangely at Eliot. "And, uh… I'm not sure if it's making any sense, but I think we might be on to something." He flipped back and forth through a few pages on the heavy book sitting between him and Sophie on the table.

Eliot nodded. "Good, good. Let's hear it."

"Like I said, not sure if it makes sense."

"How much is it not making sense?" Nate asked, sitting down next to Sophie and putting his elbows on the table.

Parker sat on the arm of Eliot's chair and tried not to stare at him from the corner of her eye.

"Well, if we're set on the forces of darkness part, I think we might have actually cracked it. You're not going to like it."

Nate frowned. "I knew I wasn't going to like it when Eliot ended up dead."

"Thanks, man."

"No problem. Let's hear it."

Hardison pushed away from the table. "Sophie can explain it better; I am just a little out of my element here."

Sophie scoffed. "Oh thank you. My element is the primordial forces of darkness and scary monsters that kill people and your element is what? Sunshine and puppies? Fine, fine. But I'm taking the credit for figuring it out then. We think it was Kuk, the Egyptian god of primordial darkness. The idea basically goes that there were four of these gods before the rest of the Egyptian gods existed, and Kuk represented darkness. The other ones were air and water and that sort of thing."

"And heart."

"Captain Planet didn't try to kill me, Hardison," Eliot snapped. "Go on, Sophie."

She grimaced and sort of waved her hands over the book helplessly. "That's pretty much it. There's not a lot of information because there's… just not." She frowned at the book, as if being cross with it would convince it to give up hidden secrets.

Nate wasn't discouraged, or, if he was, he was better at hiding it. "Okay, good starting point. But why do you think it was this… Kuk?"

"Well, the darkness, for one. You should have seen Parker's place, Nate, it wasn't like anything I've ever seen. It was like the darkness was alive." Hardison shuddered at the memory. "And Eliot ended up… well, blind, right? And look at his eyes."

Eliot sighed. "You think maybe you want to stop pointing out that I'm a freak?"

Hardison looked sheepish, then felt sheepish for looking like anything when Eliot couldn't see him. He cleared his throat. "Then there's this leg. We said it looked froggy, right? Well, these four god dudes, in their male forms were frog people, so that fits too."

"And Eliot's chart at the hospital said he was very dehydrated when the brought him in," Sophie added.

For some reason, probably the lingering effects of previously being dead, Eliot took that to be a personal attack. "What the hell does that got to do with frogs of darkness?"

Sophie glanced at Hardison, who shrugged. "Egypt, desert, lack of water… Makes sense to me."

"That seems like a stretch," Eliot snorted, unimpressed.

Hardison slammed the book shut and startled everyone. "Fine, man, whatever, do you want to read through all these books and try to find the right evil monster bad guy? I didn't think so."

"You… Really?" Eliot said quietly after a moment. "You actually went there?"

Hardison looked around for some sort of help. Everyone else had slightly shocked looks, like they too could not believe he had gone that far.

"Hey, imagine that, it's past everyone's bed time," Nate said, getting to his feet and gripping Hardison by the arm. "I think we've all had a pretty strange day and everything will look…. Everything will _be_ better in the morning once we've had some sleep and some coffee. So let's all just relax and get some sleep here tonight. It's easier for me to look after… To keep an eye… To watch… Just everyone stay here and go to sleep and not kill each other."

There was a tense moment when he thought it wouldn't work but it did, and they mumbled 'good night's, and no one got punched in the throat even though it was evident Eliot was still considering it.

Nate poured himself three fingers of scotch and leaned on the kitchen counter. Heller gave him a look that was definitely not very dog-like and went to find Parker's feet so he could sleep on them.

"Good boy," Nate muttered, tipping back his glass.

* * *

The sun rose the next morning, and Eliot wasn't the only one who couldn't see it. The local news station said the amount of pollution in the air was unprecedented, but Hardison said that was only because Boston had never been swarmed by the forces of darkness before.

"I don't like it," he said, drawing the curtains over the window before he sat back down in front of his breakfast. "Everything, everywhere. All of Boston has gone crazy. Good potatoes, Eliot," he said with his mouth full. "Look here," Hardison continued. "A guy went to milk his cows and instead of milk, it was blood. That's just messed up."

Parker leaned over the laptop and snagged a piece of toast off Hardison's plate at the same time. "A guy was milking his cows… in Boston? _That's_ messed up."

"Okay, the Greater Boston area has all gone to hell then. Seventy-nine automobile accidents in a two hour span on the same road. A lot of the drivers claiming they just suddenly 'couldn't see anything'. Oh, and thirty-six of those were fatal, too. Six babies disappeared off the maternity ward at Massachusetts General in between nursing shift changes. I don't even know how many tweets about weird stuff, little stuff."

Nate frowned intensely into his cup of coffee. "This is not good."

"Augh, oh no." Hardison cringed away from his computer. When he opened his eyes again and saw the quizzical looks, he assured them they absolutely didn't want to hear about the bad things happening at the baby bunny sanctuary.

Parker was suddenly not interested at all in stolen toast. She dropped it into Heller's conveniently waiting mouth, followed quickly by the rest of breakfast off her plate, and then the plate as well.

Nate wasn't overly attached to his department store place settings, so he didn't bother to say anything. Instead he launched into the itinerary for the day. "Parker, Sophie, I made a call last night and Professor Fanous from the Egyptology department at Yale is waiting to meet with you. I told her you'd be there around noon, so you have some time to make up a better back story. I just said you were writing an article." Sophie immediately started working on the details and, for some reason, counting things out on her fingers.

"Hardison, you're also going undercover. Saint John's Seminary. Find out what you can about Death, as in the Grim Reaper, and the nature of souls and that sort of thing. I'm interested to know what information is out there about the possibility that Death could be a person."

Nate paused in thought. "Yeah, that's everything. If I think of anything else, I'll text you. I'm going to pay a quick visit to the city planning office. I want to see if I can turn up any old plans of the sewers and tunnels. Maybe there's something there that we might be able to use."

Eliot tilted his head, his blank, black eyes staring unnervingly at nothing. "And me?"

"Take the day off, Eliot. You're still recovering, and there's no sense in stressing over the little stuff if we can take care of it."

That went over about as well as a screen door on a submarine.

"'The little stuff'? Like finding what killed me and is now trying to kill all of Boston? Yeah, that's nothing I'm worried about," Eliot said, voice surprisingly even. "I'm fine, Nate. If I was not fine, I would take a day off. But I'm not not-fine, so I am going to do my job like the rest of you. And just so you all know, I _am_ fine. The only thing I need right now is the same as what you all need, and that's to find out what's doing this and stop it."

Nate looked like he had something else to say, but he stopped. "Okay. You go with Hardison, find out what you can. We'll all meet back here ASAP." There was a flurry of activity when everyone got ready to head out. Heller whined by Parker's boots until she told him was coming along.

"Be careful," Nate said, pulling Sophie away from Parker and the hellhound for a moment. "I don't think we've seen even half of what this thing is capable of and if it's targeting Parker…"

"We're going to be fine, Nate. You be careful too."

* * *

Nate's trip to the planning office went well enough, and he got back to his place with an armful of blueprints. Parker, Sophie and Heller were waiting for him.

"Got everything that we need?" Sophie asked, mouth quirking as a few rolled sets of plans tumbled to the floor.

"I hope so. Lots of stuff for us to sift through, anyways."

"Oh goodie, I do love research. And another thing," she asked, smirking to Parker. "How exactly do you know the lovely Professor Fanous? She had so many nice things to say about you, and oh so many questions."

"Oh, IYS insured some things a few years back for a loan from Alexandria, that's all."

Sophie gave him a look that said 'oh, I bet that's all,' and 'I also bet you never noticed she was a stunningly attractive, intelligent woman who thinks you're fantastic,' and a hundred other things Parker had no idea one look could say. She stayed out of it. She'd stayed out of most of the conversation with Professor Fanous as well, content to let Sophie work her conversational magic. Unfortunately, this gave all the uneasy, painful, complicated thoughts time to catch up with her.

"You okay, Parker?" Nate asked when he caught her faraway look.

"Fine," she said quickly. "Just thinking about bunnies."

"Good."

As if she had just realized how quiet Nate's apartment was, Sophie looked around. "Where are the boys?"

"Not back yet. The last text said they'd run into a bit of a snag and were on their way back." Nate shrugged. "Whatever that means."

Twenty minutes later, when Eliot and Hardison burst through the door, it turned out to mean 'Eliot is so terrible at being subtle, it was physically painful.'

"And I mean that literally," Hardison clarified. "Because every time I tried to reword one of his questions so it was less creepy and accusatory, he kicked me."

"Not hard," Eliot grumbled.

"It doesn't help that he has freaky demon-looking eyes," Hardison said. He held up his hands defensively when Eliot turned and gave the spot on the wall just past his shoulder a withering glare. "No offense, man, but you do."

Before it all escalated into something Nate wasn't prepared to finish, he redirected. He sometimes felt most of his job involved redirecting. "Parker, what did you and Sophie get from Dellandra? I mean... Professor Fanous?"

At a quick glance from Nate, Parker launched right into an explanation about the primordial gods of Egypt so Sophie wouldn't comment on the accidental first name usage.

"In the time before time, there were four gods, or maybe eight, because they could each be male or female but not at the same time or maybe at the same time. The writings are sort of complicated about all that. But these four-slash-eight gods were the primordial -- that means sort of the original or earliest form of anything -- they were the primordial gods and they were all brothers or sisters or brothers _and_ sisters or whatever. But then they started fighting with each other and when the new gods, like Ra and Osiris and all the ones you've heard of started showing up, the old gods decided to retire, kind of. Except the god Kuk. He wanted to keep being powerful. So his brothers and sisters took all his power and his shape and exiled him into nothingness and he disappeared."

Sophie jumped in. "Because he was the god of chaos and darkness, his brothers and sisters couldn't fully take that from him. None of them were really stronger than any of the others. So when they banished him, he took a scrap of darkness and a scrap of chaos, and, because those were the only things he had, that's what he became. The old writings say that he waits at the end of the world to destroy everything his sisters and brothers once sold him out for, since they are long dead now."

Hardison loosened his collar and started undoing the buttons on the sleeves of his cassock. "Okay, what did they sell him out for though?"

"The new gods. And the people who made the new gods." Parker shrugged. "Professor Fanous thinks it's all mythology and everything, so we couldn't outright ask her if she thought it was all happening."

"Destroy the people who made the gods…" Hardison trailed off in thought, but Eliot apparently was having approximately the same thought.

"But isn't Boston in the twenty first century pretty much the furthest you can get from ancient Egypt?" he pointed out.

Nate was waiting for both of them at the station when that awful train of thought finally pulled in. "I think it just wants to destroy people in general. Have you seen any of the latest news? It's not just Boston anymore. Rockport, Plymouth, Providence… The accidents, missing persons, the mysterious air pollution blocking out the sunlight… This Kuk guy has big plans."

Eliot twisted in his seat. Uncomfortable thoughts had a tendency to manifest as uncomfortable feelings with him. "What does this all have to do with Parker."

"It's the souls," Parker said. She put her hands on Heller, stroking the soft fur between his enormous ears to help herself relax. "Kuk can tap the power from the souls and use it to take on a shape, a real, solid shape. I missed some. I'm supposed to be picking them up, right, and I missed some and he got them and now he's real and he's ruining everything."

Heller huffed his agreement and dropped his head into her lap, causing the whole chair to shake a little under the weight.

"Eliot, tell them what we got," Hardison said suddenly, pulling his laptop bag out from under the couch and rummaging around.

Normally Eliot would argue on principle, because he felt that any chance to argue with Hardison that he didn't take was a little bit of happiness he'd never get back, but something in Hardison's tone told him to skip the bickering.

"There used to be a widespread belief among both religious people and non-religious people that Death was a big, tall skeleton man with a cloak and scythe. Mostly a Middle Ages theory. But in modern history you don't usually see that belief outside of television and heavy metal albums. The Church's official viewpoint is that no, there is not a Death per say. There is a Death in the Bible, in the Book of Revelation, which outlines how the end of the world is going to happen. Uh, nothing in there about ancient Egyptian frog gods though."

"Also the priest at Saint John's said that souls can't be recycled or whatever Parker's supposed to do with them, but he did say that they’re very powerful things," Hardison added without looking up from the computer screen, fingers flying over the keyboard. "He doesn't believe in hellhounds. Sorry Heller. Hey, Heller. Hellhound. That's funny."

However funny it might have been, no one was laughing, because the screens on the other side of the room were showing what Hardison was working on. It looked like a whole bunch of tiny flying letters and numbers, but then that window minimized and the screen showed a map of Massachusetts.

"Okay," Hardison said sighing. "This is us." A dark black circle appeared over Boston. "There's Providence, Exeter, Rockport, Plymouth, Nashua… All the places that those strange reports have been coming in from. I wrote a little program that will watch all the major news sites and update the new cases. The keywords are a little vague, so some of these might be unrelated, right, but it'll get most of them."

As he spoke, a few more black dots appeared on the map, as far north as Mount Washington.

"Then, we figure if the darkness is not just in these places but obviously has to travel between them because we know he has a physical body…" Hardison hit a few more keys, the rapid fire clacking sounding more than a little ominous in the quiet apartment. The black dots morphed and spread out, stretching out to touch each other like friendly drops of ink. The final product was anything but friendly.

"You can't say he's not getting stronger. It’s Tuesday," Hardison said, glancing down again. "If this rate keeps up, by Thursday at noon, this is what we'll see." The screens shifted and panned out, showing a map of North America with a big blotch of black across everything east of Colorado.

"Assuming oceans are not a problem, here's Friday morning." Another few clicks showed all of North and South America blacked out.

"And then Sunday, just after church lets out." There were a few places around the North and South Pole and, strangely, in the middle of the Australian Outback that were untouched by the creeping blackness.

"I don't fancy the idea of moving out there," Sophie shuddered.

"Neither do I," Nate admitted. "So let's see what we can do about a plan then."

* * *

The plan was inelegant and almost fumbling, but it would serve them well enough considering the restricted time frame.

Nate was grimacing over the tunnel blueprints for the west part of the city. The ice cubes tinkled in his glass of scotch. Parker knew he rarely watered down his drinks with ice. Maybe this exception meant something important.

"These maps are ancient," Hardison complained. "Hang on, I can get new ones like that." He snapped his fingers 'like that.'

"No, older is better. Kuk is ancient, old, from before time. He's going to feel more at home in the oldest sections. The parts so old that they've dropped off the new maps. Trust me," Nate said. And of course they did.

He seemed unsure of himself, balancing a red marker in his hand, staring at the map. "Hardison, can you bring up all the earliest events on the map of Boston? And add Parker's place in there too."

Once it was up on the screen, Nate moved a bunch of the blueprints around on the counter and frowned harder.

"Oh," Hardison got up and moved around to the other end, looking at everything from a different angle. "What are you thinking, that that's where his nest has to be?"

While Nate and Hardison went over possible hide outs for the forces of darkness, Parker was walking herself through the steps involved in breaking into the underground storage area at the National Art Museum of China to help herself relax, but when she'd done the entire job in under thirteen minutes, she started to lose interest.

"Eliot, pick a number," she said. He was doing something with his knife and a piece of leather, something that was making a scratchy, rasping noise that reminded her of heavy breathing and the promise of something worse to come. Parker knew that the little things Eliot did with his hands were the same as the imaginary heists she planned in her head because they made him feel better when he was having a bad day, so she didn't ask him to stop even though the noise made her feel uncomfortable.

"A million," he said.

"No, a realistic number."

His hands paused and turned towards her. Parker still felt a little shock of surprise and fear when Eliot turned his eyes on her. It was starting to turn, she noted. It was still surprise, but it was more surprise and anger now, rather than fear.

"Parker, a million is realistic, especially for us. How often do we deal with that much money?"

"Okay, a realistic number of security guards you might find in a Chinese museum on an overnight shift right before a new exhibit opens and they're moving everything around upstairs."

"Oh." Eliot thought for a few moments, his hands taking up again with the knife and the leather. "The National Museum or Guangdong?"

"National."

"Eight. Or six on Sundays."

"Right."

The imaginary Chinese heist took seventeen minutes when she accounted for the additional guards. Just as she started to do it a third time, this time with the guards and a small rabbit-shaped accomplice, Heller butted his head against her leg and gave her very concerned doggy eyes.

"What's his problem?" Eliot asked, setting down the knife again.

"Don't know. Heller, what's that?" Parker pulled the slightly damp piece of paper from his mouth and regarded it strangely. "Paper?"

Eliot smirked. "The dog brought you a love letter?"

"It's just an address," Parker told him, looking at Heller. "What is it?"

Heller just pawed at the sheet of paper and gave her a more desperate look. "I'm going to go check it out," she said, standing up and brushing dog hair off her lap. "It's three blocks from here, and I'll only be a minute. Heller will come too," Parker said quickly, when Eliot stood up to follow her.

She slipped out of the apartment before anyone could call her back. The place was close by (Parker never really lied to the team) and, even though the evening was prematurely dark, it was a nice night. Any good feelings the fresh air and light wind gave her, however, were dashed hopelessly against the rocks of nasty reality when she got to the address on the paper.

The street in front of the little grey brick building was lined with cars and people coming in and out of the door were dressed all in black. 'Funeral Today, Park Up The Road', said a little sign in the window.

Of course it would be another soul she had to pick up, and, of course, it wouldn't be sitting in the garden. Parker screwed up her courage, pointed Heller to an unobtrusive spot behind a recycling bin and went inside with a group of older ladies who were all trying to talk over each other in the polite way that older ladies do.

Some of the people looked sad, but most of the people were laughing and chatting. Parker had only been to one funeral in her life and it had been really sad, until they got home and Sophie wasn't really dead. This was a wake, she decided, looking around, but she still felt it should be sad.

"How did you know Eugenia, dear?" asked one of the older ladies, just noticing Parker for the first time. She was wearing a horrible green pant suit, complete with matching straw hat.

"Oh, she was my… friend?" Parker knew it was a terrible answer that sounded like a question the moment it left her lips, but without Sophie or Hardison in her ear coaching her through, this grifting business was damn hard work.

"Really? What's your name?"

"Par… tridge." She really hoped that an asteroid would coming screaming and flaming down to earth and land on her head right at this moment, because Parker was sure that would be preferable to the woman's scrutinizing eyes.

"Oh, you must be one of those hippie kids she met down at the Whole Foods. Nice to meet you, Partridge, I'm Opal."

Parker shook her outstretched hand. "Yes, that's it exactly," she said, not quite sure how she'd managed to pull it off. "It was sad how Eugenia um… died."

"Of course, cancer's never pretty," Opal said, giving Parker another sideways look. "But then again, did you hear about all those car accidents on the highway this morning? That would be a terrible way to go."

Parker nodded in agreement. She glanced around the house. It was nice, tastefully decorated. Sort of boring, really, and nothing caught her attention or stood out. Nothing was glowing. Parker had never been sent to a specific soul before, she had just sort of stumbled onto them. The book claimed she was supposed to have been told about each one a few days before it was due to be collected, but, not for the first time, Parker thought the book was an idiot. She wasn't really sure where to start, except… "So… This is a wake, isn't it? Shouldn't there be a body somewhere?"

Opal stared at her for a second, then laughed. "I like you, Partridge, straight and to the point. Reminds me a little of a younger Eugenia. And yes, you can pay your last respects in the sitting room. Come on with me, then we'll see what sort of goodies Maude brought. I saw her carrying a tray in from the car earlier."

They entered the sitting room and Parker saw the open casket first. She shuddered internally, instantly getting the creeped-upon feeling she associated with dead bodies. The second thing she noticed was the soft, red glow coming from inside the coffin.

"Oh no," she muttered. Opal patted her elbow consolingly.

"I know it's hard," she said. "By my age, you'll have been to a thousand, and I swear it never really gets easier. You just make the best and soldier on."

Parker approached the casket and bent her head like she wanted to pay her respects. The source of the light was a silver hairpin in the shape of an 'E', nestled right in the woman's white hair. The dead lady in the coffin looked nice enough, other than being dead, and her hair looked very nice. Parker took the little glowing soul, careful not to leave a strand of hair out of place. "I'm sorry," she whispered, sliding the hair pin into her pocket.

"And I'm sorry you're dead, too," she added after a moment. "Although if the next twelve hours don't go exactly according to plan, you might be glad you are."

When she walked back to Opal, the old woman smiled a little half-sad smile, a funeral smile. "Feel better?"

"No," Parker said truthfully.

"That's okay," Opal said, pointing Parker towards the kitchen. "Let's get something to eat."

* * *

"I brought you guys some sandwiches," Parker called out when she got back to Nate's apartment. "And there were crab puffs, but Heller got them all before I could stop him."

Everyone was crowded around the counter, and they all looked up expectantly when she came in.

"Was it a soul?" Hardison asked. "Did you get it?"

"I did." She pulled the silver E from her pocket and held it out. Hardison took it carefully and turned it over in his fingers.

"But how can you even tell? It's just a hair clip."

"It's glowing," Parker said, setting down a parcel of snacks on top of the blueprints and loose leaf paper spread over the counter.

"You're the only one who can see it though," Hardison said, frowning. "It's so weird, it doesn't feel warm or anything. It's just… a thing."

"Ooh, butter tarts," Sophie smiled, diving into the food like she hadn't eaten all day and there wasn't a human soul four inches from her face.

"So, the plan then, once more for Parker," Nate said, taking a sandwich from the pile and biting into it. "Ew, ham." He pushed it into Eliot's hands and reached for another one.

"So this is how it's going to go down. We found the section of tunnels most likely to be a hideaway for a god of chaos and darkness. We even found a way in, though it's not going to be easy. We now have bait," Nate pointed to the soul still in Hardison's hand. "And we think we have a weapon." He paused, waiting for the weapon to be flourished. It was not.

"Oh, right, here's your weapon," Eliot said around a mouthful of sandwich. He set a container of salt on the counter.

"Salt…" Parker said slowly, wondering if maybe Eliot had grabbed the wrong weapon, or if his brain was still a little scrambled from being dead.

"Salt," he repeated. His tone gave Parker the idea again that he could read minds and did not think highly of her scrambled brain theory.

_Sorry Eliot,_ she thought, just in case.

Hardison explained. "The popular theory out there is that unclean, evil things can't handle being touched by pure things. Salt is pure and clean and all that. Also, this is an Egyptian god, right, and the Egyptians used salt to preserve mummies. We're thinking it'll be a double whammy."

"I thought it was a special kind of salt," she said, recalling everything she knew about expensive Egyptian artifacts.

"Natron," Hardison said. "But that's hard to make and even harder to find. Besides, it's just fancy salt." He rattled the cardboard container. "This'll work."

"There's also a lamp," Nate went on. "It's a special UV light, like the sun, so with a nice, long extension cord, maybe that will help too. And we'll have to find a sword or a knife, maybe something iron."

Sophie looked awkwardly at Parker over the end of her butter tart. "One thing. The book is sort of leading us to believe this is something you have to do alone."

All of Parker's insides tried to jump two feet to the right at the same time. "What? No, I can't! I don't know how, I don't know… Remember what happened last time I tried to do a job alone?"

Eliot snorted. "Yes, that's why you're not going alone."

"But Sophie said --"

"I said the book was leading us to _believe_ you should go alone," Sophie corrected, taking another tart.

"And since when do we do anything by the book?"

"Oh man, Hardison, how long you been waiting to use that one?" Eliot groaned.

Hardison beamed. "Shut up, man, that was slick."

Parker's heart rate came down from humming bird levels, but she still wasn't fully comforted. "But if the book says I should be alone and it had that awful picture of what would happen if I messed it up…" she trailed off, unwilling or unable to finish the thought.

"This is the way we see it," Hardison said. "Sorry," he added in Eliot's direction without missing a beat. "The way we are thinking about it is that either a) none of it works and we all die, but at least we die together, or b) it does work and we kill this Kuk thing and then something else comes along to get us because we broke the rules in the ugly ass picture book and then we can either beat _that_ or die trying, or c) we kill this Kuk thing and nothing else bad happens and we can all live happily ever after. Whatever way, though, we're not going to let you go into the sewer to fight some god demon monster thing that blinds people for fun and uses bunnies for -- no, never mind the rabbits again. Not going to let you go in there alone, Parker."

"Yeah, I think I proved that doesn't go very well," Eliot said dryly.

"So, we lure him out of hiding with the soul, then bam, we attack him with all we've got," Nate finished, wind taken out of his sails somewhat after Hardison's heart-warming little speech.

"And if that doesn't work?" Parker asked.

"Like Hardison said. At least we die together. But it will work." The last part got tacked on at the end, like Nate only just remembered to say it. Parker didn't like that either. Nate was always positive about the plan. The unconscious pessimism was like the ice in the scotch. He didn't seem like himself right now.

"Okay, one more sandwich each," Nate said, heaving a sigh and heading for the kitchen to refill his glass. "Then we've got to go. Every minute that goes by, he's getting stronger out there." No one risked looking at the map on the screen behind them for fear of being further disheartened.

"Nate?" Parker said, following him away from the others. "Can I talk to you?"

He was rinsing his cup. "Sure, what's up?"

"Are you okay?"

"It's the end of the world," he shrugged. "I guess I just have a lot to think about." Nate put the clean glass away in the cupboard above his head, then straightened up the tea towel hanging from the front of the oven.

"It's going to be okay, Parker," he said, with only the barest hint of a sigh in his voice.

"I was going to say the same thing to you," Parker said. She gave him a smile, the bravest she could. "Only with your name instead of mine."

"Of course."

"Ready?" Sophie asked, popping in behind Parker. "We're all ready to go when you are."

Parker and Nate traded a 'now or never' look, and they left together.

* * *

Getting into the tunnel turned out to be a little harder than they had originally anticipated. "Nothing to it," Parker assured them when she saw the forty foot climb straight up into the barred storm drain opening over the river.

"But all of us?" Sophie said doubtfully. "I mean, with the dog? And I'm sorry to say it, but Eliot if you can't see…"

"Don't worry about me, you just worry about you."

"It hasn't rained in what? Fifteen, sixteen days? It should be fine," Parker said, mostly to herself. "Oh, and I wouldn't worry about Heller, he has a way of being able to get wherever I am pretty easy."

"Then why did he have to ride in the truck? Couldn't he have just found his way out here?" Hardison was still feeling a little squashed and, therefore, less charitable.

Parker didn't answer because she was already halfway up the wall, finding even the smallest hand holds on the rough stones. "Looks good from here," she called out, throwing down a rope when she got to the top.

"Y'all know I got an A+ in skipping gym when I was in school, right?" Hardison grumbled, staring up at the rope. As he stared and tried to figure out where exactly to start, a dark nose and a set of floppy ears peered back down at him. "Oh, come on, how is that even possible?"

"Hurry up!" Parker shouted down.

Sophie nudged Hardison out of the way and started pulling herself up the wall, shoes sliding slightly on the rock as she climbed. Nate went next and left Eliot to smirk at Hardison in the last rays of the quickly fading daylight.

"Go on," Eliot smiled. "You can do it." It was the least encouraging encouragement Hardison had ever received.

"No, it's cool, you should go ahead. I'll, uh… spot you?"

Eliot laughed, not entirely cruel, but a little less than fully kind. "I'll be fine, it's you that should be worried." He crossed his arms and waited.

Hardison made it halfway up the rope before he decided he didn't really care if the world ended.

"You're doing fine," Sophie called down. She and Nate each reached down, offering help, and, from as high up as he was, he could barely hear Eliot's chuckling.

Hardison finally hauled himself over the ledge into the mouth of the sewer pipe and breathed a sigh of relief. Then he immediately wished he hadn't. "Oh, ew, sewer smell." There was a general noise of agreement.

"It's only going to get worse once we get past these bars and into the sewer proper," Parker said, already producing a file from one of her many hidden pockets. "They're rusted pretty bad, we should be able to get through easy enough."

Eliot caught the end of what Parker said as he appeared over the edge of the culvert and pulled the rope up after him. "Think we can just force them apart?" he asked.

"Jesus, how did you get up here so fast?" Hardison exclaimed, shrinking away in surprise. "Was one of your parents a freakin' spider monkey? Are you secretly Matt Murdock?"

Eliot gave him the classic 'oh, honey, please' look and edged through the crowded space to the bars. "Oh, yeah. These will come right down." With one big tug, the rusted bar came away in his hand.

"I swear," Hardison said, still gaping. "You're kind of a freak."

"If he's a freak, what does that make me?" Parker asked, while she stood back and let Eliot yank out another bar. Heller helped by grabbing a third in his teeth and pulling it out. He looked at Parker hopefully, and, when she gave him a nod, he gobbled down the rusted metal gleefully.

Hardison laughed softly. "We're all freaks. You, me, Nate, Eliot, that dog. Sophie's actually pretty normal, but she hangs out with us, so that makes her a freak." On a passing whim, he reached out and took her hand too, squeezing it gently. "But that's a good thing. It means we might actually have a chance. No one ever expects the freaks to win; we have the element of surprise on our side."

She wasn't sure she believed him, but she was comforted by the effort.

"Who's going first?" Sophie asked once Heller and Eliot had wreaked enough destruction on the metal bars keeping them from their target.

Parker wasn't sure what it was -- the way Nate looked at her with something in his eyes approaching pride, the warmth of Hardison's hand on her own, the determined stance of the dog she'd come to think of as her protector, maybe some combination of all of those things, or she was just going crazy, but Parker hefted her flashlight and led the way.

Heller ran ahead, splashing in the mucky water and acting just a little too excited to be traipsing through Boston's ancient sewer tunnels towards what might be their collective doom. He bounded back, tail whipping fiercely and almost vibrating in an effort to keep from barking.

"I think we're getting closer," Eliot said, from closest to the wall of the tunnel. "It's getting darker."

Hardison seemed about to ask how Eliot knew, but Eliot's expression was one of thunder and wrath, and Hardison shut his mouth with an audible snap.

"And warmer," Sophie said, closing her eyes to try and feel it better. "Drier."

Nate made the connection first. "Like the desert?"

The tunnel ahead of them opened suddenly into a large room. Parker's flashlight beam got lost somewhere in the middle.

"Okay," Nate whispered. "You all know what to do. It doesn't have to be perfect --" Sophie grimaced and he waved her off. "It _doesn't_ have to be perfect. Just get in there and get it done."

Hardison touched the hairpin in his pocket and then sighed. "This is the craziest plan we've tried in a while. Eliot, there's a bit of a step down."

Eliot had been about to step into the room, but paused at Hardison's warning. "...Thanks," he said after a moment, stepping down without so much as a hitch.

The plan was mostly inelegant and a little obvious, but the hope was that it was so obvious that no one would ever guess that it was their plan at all. Take the soul and use it as bait to lure Kuk in close enough that they could attack him. Obvious, inelegant, but hopefully effective.

"Oh man, Eliot," Hardison said, suddenly sounding loud and bright. "It's been a really crazy week or so. All those terrible things happening, all those people dying all over Boston. It's almost like it's the end of the world or something."

"Laying it on a little thick?" Eliot muttered under his breath before affecting his own falsely play-acting voice. "I know, isn't it crazy? And I wish Parker had given us more information about this errand. She just wanted us to get rid of this thing." He followed the sound of Hardison's footsteps, further into the pitch darkness of the wide open room.

"She was pretty adamant that we get rid of this little trinket. I think she was drunk or something. She said it was glowing red."

"Yeah, that's pretty crazy."

Edging her way along the wall inch by inch, Sophie cringed with the insincerity of it all. It offended her on both a personal and professional level, but as time was really of the essence, she kept the majority of her complaints to herself. "Absolutely not convincing," she whispered. Nate shushed her from a few feet behind.

In the middle of the blackness, unseen but unfortunately not out of range of hearing, Hardison and Eliot continued their almost-transparently-bad acting.

"She told me it was a soul. Like, a person's soul," Eliot said, trying to affect a conspiratorial tone, and it actually kind of worked. Some tendril of consciousness picked up on the key word and the hushed tone and something in the darkness stirred.

"But that's ridiculous!" Hardison said, feeling the air shift and all his fight or flight instincts kick into high gear. He tried to ignore it all and focus on, as Sophie put it, selling the bit and not getting kidnapped by Russians to do it.

"I know, she's lost her mind, but that's what she told me." If Eliot felt the changes in the room, he didn't let on.

Hardison pulled the hair clip from his pocket. "I guess we'll leave it here, like we promised."

The darkness around them came alive.

* * *

Death was there, in that sewer, in those pipes. Not in the way that Death could be anywhere Death needed or wanted to be, but in the physical sense. Death was wearing shoes, which Death thought was rather novel, and drawing air into lungs made from flesh, which was just a little more novel than the shoes.

* * *

The loud, mouth breathing humans had found him. He'd been expecting that. He had to admit he expected them to be more clever. Their little charade was not at all convincing, and, though he couldn't quite figure out what they had planned, they obviously thought they could hurt him, maybe even try to stop him.

The strong one was alive, and that was not expected, but whether it was four or five come to call, he was confident he would be sleeping in a warm nest of their intestines before the moon came out that night.

But then one of them was holding a soul. It didn't look like much, just a regular little mortal soul trapped in a useless little bauble. The creature that was made of darkness had gotten strong over the last day, strong on the power of the hoard it had found in the girl human's home, and even stronger on the dizzying power of violence and torture.

On the off chance that these humans and their beast hound had some sort of plan and this was meant to lure him out, he would ignore them instead. When they got frustrated and lashed out, he would take them then, culling the whole stupid herd of them, and he would make a quilt out of their corpses.

* * *

Nothing was happening, and Parker was getting more and more keyed up. Heller had wandered off into the dark the moment the guys had started talking, and Nate and Sophie were far off somewhere on her right. She felt more cut off in the oppressive blackness than she ever had on a job before, even including the time she'd been stuck in the old dumbwaiter shaft without being able to use her earbud or scratch her nose for five hours.

And she suddenly became aware that their plan wasn't working but she wasn't sure how to get the message to the others without giving away that they had a plan in the first place.

"Did she tell you whose soul it was?" Parker heard Eliot say. That had not been in the original script. Her heart did a metaphorical flip. Maybe Eliot had an alternate plan. Maybe his plan would work. Maybe they would defeat all the forces of darkness and they could all go home and she could get an ice cream float and stop seeing souls and dead people and everything would go back to normal and Hardison would go with her to China and they could break into the National Art Museum and everything would be okay after all. Maybe, just maybe...

Maybe that would have happened in any other situation, but in this particular situation, Hardison's improv skills apparently had been left at the bottom of the culvert. "She said the soul was... Santa's."

Maybe they were all going to die messily in a sewer pipe and no one would ever find any bits of them bigger than a fingernail.

In her mind's eye, Parker saw herself putting her head in her hands. She also saw Eliot kicking Hardison in the face for being a damn fool.

"Santa's... soul." Eliot's tone made it clear he was sharing Parker's vision. This was not lost on Hardison, because Eliot could be about as subtle as getting run down by a monster truck, but Hardison clearly thought he was too far in to back out now.

"Santa Claus, yeah, can you imagine?"

"I cannot."

"I mean, if it really were Santa Claus' soul and this wasn't just Parker getting into your stash of absinthe again? Imagine how insane Santa's soul would be. All that power, all that life, right here in this little thing."

There was the briefest hint of movement in the darkness, like a fat, sleepy cat opening one eye at the sound of kibble in a dish. Just the tiniest spark of interest. But it was enough. Now they had the mark hooked and it was only a matter of reeling him in.

* * *

Something about the name had stirred recognition. All the souls he'd hungrily devoured, all the knowledge and the experiences that coursed through him, something in him perked up when the stupid men talked about this Santa Claus. The thing made of darkness that had been small, without a shape, and was now large and powerful and very real, scrunched up his face while he tried to grasp onto the complicated little things swimming in him that had once been human thoughts.

Santa Claus was ten hundred years old. Santa Claus could fly around the world in just one inky black night. Santa Claus judged all the people in the world and delivered appropriate rewards and punishments. Names poured into his mind; Santa Claus, Olentzero, Father Christmas, Sinterklaas, Saint Nicholas, Božiček... All around the world, people knew this Santa Claus and people believed in his power.

The weak, red glow pulsing in the man's hand flickered for a moment and grew stronger as he watched. The colour and brightness drew him in, circling closer to the men in the middle of the room and further from his hiding place. If the soul of Santa Claus was really right before him, all he had to do was reach out and take it and only these few were here to put up any fight, which he already knew from experience was not really any fight at all.

Closer and closer to the bright red flicker of power, close enough to smell the stink of uneasy fear on the man holding it, close enough to almost taste it.

Heller leapt from behind, teeth and nails sinking into the back of the creature, pinning it to the floor. It screamed an unworldly noise and twisted against the hellhound, but just as he freed his arm and reached for the dog's neck, someone shouted.

"Hit the lights!"

Lights blazed around him, catching him very much with his guard down. He felt his new skin start to sizzle, melting and twisting under the onslaught of light, and he screamed again.

The noise was too much for Hardison, who ducked and twisted with his hands over his ears. The scream was like nothing he had heard before and it made him instantly want to throw up, which was one of his least favourite past times. The soul trapped in the metal E tumbled to the floor.

Kuk just had time to watch it happen, feeling his blood, thick with midnight, dripping and pooling around him where the dog's teeth had ripped, before his eyes burnt up to nothing in the bright lights. He reached blindly, drawn magnetically to the soul, but just before he felt it under his fingers, a foot came down heavy on his arm.

"No," said the voice above him. "Not this time." He recognized the voice of the man he'd killed and cursed aloud that he hadn't done the job properly.

"Kuk kukk kiii," he spat, then struggled harder to free himself. His body was trying to rebuild itself even after the damage it had taken, but it was taking strength from other parts of him. Words escaped him, and he was unable to properly tell the humans exactly what he wanted to do with their lifeless corpses once he had kill them and eaten their eyes in vengeance.

With the man pinning his arm and the dog standing on his back, Kuk felt small and compressed. He struggled to draw a breath, and, when he exhaled, he tried one of his craftier tricks and exhaled living darkness around them all. He was weak, pathetically so, and the darkness only swirled around their ankles, biting and scratching where it could, but falling flat and dying when it couldn't draw strength from its master.

Heller released him finally, pouncing on the dying darkness and tearing it in half. Kuk used this opportunity to twist against the weight on his arm, pushing and pulling and trying to get free. He hissed again, in a language long lost and longer dead, but his hate turned to agony when the salt touched him.

It was not an eternity he spent lying on the floor and convulsing against the pain. Kuk had lived an eternity before the stars and before the world and the terrible pestilential humans swarming around on it. He'd had an eternity with his brothers and sisters in the warm, primordial waters and in the cold space between worlds since they banished him. The time he spent in pain was not an eternity, but it may as well have been.

"Is it dead?" Hardison asked after the creature finally lay still.

Sophie approached slowly, still pointing her flashlight directly at it. "I don't know, how can you tell with a god of darkness?"

It was a sodden shape of twisted black, heaped on the floor. Its shape hinted at frog in the legs, but was also vaguely reminiscent of crow, beetle and bear in different ways. No one was volunteering to check for a pulse. Slowly, Eliot stepped back, being careful to scrape his boots on the stones lest he track any bits out the way they came and contaminated anything.

Parker drew closer, patting Heller reassuringly and not even noticing the sticky, black tar substance dripping from his jaws. "He's not dead," she whispered, straightening up. "I don't think any of this can kill him."

"You're right," said an unfamiliar voice. Light filled the room, the soft, misty light of a spring morning, though they were definitely still underground. They all looked up, startled, but the light didn't seem to be coming from anything and no one was there.

No one but Nate.

"I'm sorry," he said, shrugging in a very un-Nate-like way. "The small deception was necessary to ensure my security. I hope you understand." Something about his voice had changed and though he looked like Nate on the surface, he moved in a way that was foreign.

"Who the hell are you?" Eliot snarled, reaching out and pulling Sophie's arm when he found it, bringing her behind him.

The person who was suddenly not Nate inclined his head, as if seeing Eliot for the first time. "Eliot Spencer," he said, and Eliot set his jaw a little tighter at the voice that sounded like shotgun shells hitting linoleum saying his name. "Your friend dropped the soul. I think you should pick it up." He didn't say where it was, and, of course, Eliot didn't see it fall, but slowly, he bent and picked it up, finding it immediately.

Parker let out a little scream and everyone (except the Nate-shaped stranger) jumped. It was only the second time she had seen a soul finding its new body and flitting out of the object it was stored in, and now that she knew what it really meant, she found it shocking and far too personal.

Eliot dropped the little silver hairpin like it had stung him and squared his shoulders, ready for any number of fights, but then he seemed to crumple in on himself momentarily. When he straightened back up, he looked around, and for the first time in two days, he saw.

The darkness had receded from his eyes. He whispered something under his breath that no one really heard, but Nate nodded like he knew exactly.

Hardison looked wildly around, still trying to identify the source of the light before he bothered trying to explain what had just happened to Eliot. "Wait, no, how did that happen? What's going on? Nate?"

But Parker knew. "It's not me, it's you," she said, taking two quick steps towards Nate but then freezing in her tracks and just staring.

"Nate tried to comfort you, to reassure you it could not be, though he didn't know why on a conscious level," he said with a voice that, to Parker, sounded like the way an old charcoal drawing smelled (when she tried to describe it, that was the only way she could fit the words together).

"Nate?" Her hand hung in the air between them. She wanted to touch him, to confirm he was solid and real and the Nate she knew, but she was so terrified she might be wrong that she couldn't bring herself to close the last few inches.

"Sometimes," Nate said. "Usually. I had my brother create this body for me, so I could travel undetected. My brother gave this body life, form, thought and dream. Freewill, too, and memories and feelings, all the things that make up a person. I am content to watch the world pass by through Nate Ford's eyes most of the time, intervening only when strictly necessary. Now, for example." He reached out and touched Parker's hand and she felt the tears spring unbidden in her eyes.

"Nate..." Sophie said, finally finding her voice again.

"Sophie," he said, smiling easily and dropping Parker's hand when he stepped forward. "This must be difficult for you. She knows me in her heart," he motioned to Parker. "And he challenged me and now knows it to be true." He indicated Eliot, then Hardison. "And he will never say when he thinks or feels in his secret thoughts, but outwardly will deny anything and everything put to him about this night. But you will have a long struggle with this, and I only hope you don't take it out on Nate. He's a good man." The Nate form paused in thought. "Although sometimes he is only the good man by playing the bad man. The concepts of good and bad are sometimes confusing."

Sophie was confused, frustrated, and beginning to get angry, and Nate sounded exactly like her Uncle Fred. It was churning up a lot of bad memories, which only made her feel worse. "What the hell is going on? Why are you talking like that?"

"Death," Parker said, still facing away from the rest of them. "Capital-D Death. The Illuminatus. Just like the book said."

There was a noise from the wrecked form of the former god of darkness.

"If you don't mind," Death said, kneeling next to the agonized creature with no regard for the cleanliness of Nate's pants. "Go, little one. You have lived a long time in happiness and pain, and your time is over now." A gusty chill came through the room, in one tunnel and disappearing out the next, when Death waved Nate's hand over what was left of Kuk. The body seemed smaller, suddenly, as the last remaining darkness seeped out, somewhere between a liquid and a gas.

"This world is filled with things that I do not understand," Death said in a voice that sounded different to each of them. "Human things. I am fascinated and terrified, I think. But the death of this world is not now. His death was. You all fought bravely." Death stood slowly, stretching out Nate's body like the muscles and skin and bones were the most intriguing things.

"Heller, come." The dog came over, looking as solemn as possible with a mouth full of half-chewed sewer rat. "You did well. You will continue to carry out your orders until further instructions become available to you."

"What instructions?" Parker asked, looking from Death to Heller and back again.

"He is to protect you and aid you. You will also continue to carry out your duties. People die every day and their souls will need to find their rightful places." Death frowned with Nate's face and glanced around to Hardison, Eliot and Sophie. "The book has very serious things to say about outsiders, does it not?"

Parker shrugged. "I never really read it cover to cover," she said mildly.

"No. You should though. It covers many rules and guidelines you'll want to break." The frown turned into a smile, though no one was really sure which was worse. "The three of you are charged, henceforth, with the same duty as the hellhound. You will protect the soul collector and aid her in any way you can. Nate will help as well, if you ask him."

No one moved and no one spoke. Sophie was still trembling with frustration and with the knowledge she would never fully understand what was happening. Hardison was thinking and feeling secret things he would never speak about and it gave him an overwhelming feeling of melancholy. Eliot was looking at everything in a new way, literally and metaphorically.

Only Parker felt comfortable talking to Death. "What are we supposed to tell Nate when he, um... Gets back?"

"Whatever you wish to tell him. I'm just a passenger; you are his family."

Nate blinked a few times, and Death was gone back to wherever it was Death went. Nate's left ear canal, maybe, or his big toe. Parker made a mental note to ask next time Death stopped by for a chat.

"It worked," he grinned, hugging Sophie and then quickly realizing there was a time and place and sewer was really not the place. She looked at him, still feeling dazed.

"Nate?"

"Yeah? Is everyone alright? Is he dead?"

"He's dead. Very dead. Dead in a way that leaves no further questions," Hardison said quickly. He slammed a secret door in his soul, locking up thoughts and feelings and immediately feeling better. "I think we should go before Heller eats any more of those rats."

They were halfway down the tunnel and feeling fresh air on their faces before Nate stopped them and exclaimed. "Eliot, you... You're all fixed!"

"I was never broken," Eliot growled, and he refused to say anything else.

Hardison drove back to Nate's. Barely anyone said a word. They had just saved the world and no one had anything they wanted to say. Nate wanted to celebrate, but everyone else wanted to sleep.

"It's been a really rough couple of days," Hardison said, sounding apologetic, but unable to meet Nate's eyes. "Maybe dinner tomorrow night?" They agreed on dinner and then Sophie told Nate she wanted to talk and Parker slipped out with Heller and Eliot right behind them.

"Thanks for everything," she said quietly when they parted ways at the bottom of the stairs. Eliot gave her a long stare. It wasn't a fierce stare or a hard stare, it was just long.

"Good night, Parker," he said.

* * *

Heller tried all his most dog-like tricks to cheer Parker up, because she seemed a little off. He did 'lie down', he did 'shake a paw', he did 'pull the screen door off the closest building and drag it home and offer the share it as a snack', but she didn't smile.

Two hours after they got home, there was a knock on the door. Heller didn't growl because he knew what was on the other side.

Hardison smiled awkwardly when he asked to come in, and Parker let him in without a word. They sat in silence for twenty minutes before Parker finally broke down and told him she was afraid.

"Afraid of this, of all of it. What if something else comes to kill us? What if more people die because I screw up? What if --?"

"What if anything, Parker," Hardison said, fiddling with the handle from the broken screen door.

"What?"

"What if anything. We could say 'what if, what if' about anything, but that doesn't change what is. Look at what we just survived. Look at all the impossible things that have happened to us in the last three days and look where we are."

Parker looked around. Her place was a lot more empty than it had been, minus the giant stack of everything she owned that wasn't in storage being stacked by the door on account of it was all broken and destroyed. There was a large, obvious bloodstain on the concrete floor between the door and the bed where Eliot had bled out just the previous morning. The repeated invasions of living darkness had given everything a vaguely smoky smell.

She started to point out all those things, but Hardison stopped her. "I meant we're alive, girl, and you know it. We're alive! The whole damn world is our oyster."

There was another knock on the door, and, this time, Heller ran over as the door opened, pouncing Eliot to the floor and slurping happily on his hair. Eliot pushed futilely against Heller's chest, but gave up after three tries and waited for Parker to call him off.

"That better not become a thing," Eliot warned, but he was grinning. "Want to go for a walk?"

Hardison groaned. "You don't think we've done enough today?"

"Let me rephrase that: put your damn shoes on, Hardison, we're going for a walk."

* * *

"It's not far," he assured them, walking backwards to face them.

"New lease on life or something, man?" Hardison asked. Eliot ignored him. It wasn't that new.

Parker had never even known there was a park near her place, but there was, and it was a nice one. The kind with swings, right near a group of tall trees to climb. She decided to bring Heller back in the day time.

"I cut through on my way home," Eliot said as he stepped over some fallen branches easily, then picked one up to brandish it fearlessly. It was a lie, because Eliot's way home went in a completely opposite direction, but who was going to argue with the man with a branch? "I thought I should show you guys."

He pointed down a little embankment towards the sound of running water. When they got to the creek, Eliot pointed upstream a little. "See?"

The mother duck and her six babies were swimming lazily in circles and figure eights. Mother duck watched her fat, yellow babies and squawked when they got too far out of sight or played too rough with each other. There were very few things in the world that would upset a duck and that fact became evident as they watched.

Eliot crouched on the bank, the toes of his boots almost in the water, and watched the ducks with the utmost attention. "We saved the world tonight," he said quietly, not taking his eyes off the birds. "We saved all of this. All these things."

There was something so awed in his voice that Hardison and Parker found themselves captivated by the swimming birds as well. They watched in silence as the ducks passed by, little feet paddling hard under the surface, but drifting along calm and serene otherwise.

Finally, the birds were out of sight. Somewhere close by, a little string quartet of crickets sang a farewell. Heller found them and ate them immediately. The moment was dented, but not ruined.

Everyone said 'good night' for the second time, and Parker walked home with the giant dog at her side, feeling much more at peace with the whirlwind of recent events than she thought she ever would.

* * *

Dinner the next night was good. Eliot made tortellini, and Heller made sure there were absolutely no leftovers. They drank wine and talked about how lucky the world was to be safe again. No one told Nate he was the unwitting host to a very strange passenger or that there was a chance he was not born so much as wished into existence, because, whatever he was or was not, he was definitely still Nate.

It was almost surprising how fast things went back to normal.

* * *

Death reclined comfortably in a chair that maybe existed in a place that certainly most likely existed somewhere that might have been inside Nate Ford or maybe just in his mind or possibly in Delaware, and watched the world go by. Death saw Hardison and Eliot bickering over anything and everything, but good-naturedly. Death saw Sophie give much-needed hugs and heard her say things that were sweet and kind to everyone at one point or another. Death saw Parker grow into her new responsibilities with the help of her friends that were really family and Death saw her smile more and teach the hellhound to do tricks no hellhound had ever done before (especially the trick at the National Art Museum of China).

Death thought many things and nothing all at once, because that's what Death can do, but when Death watched through Nate Ford's eyes, Death thought the tricky human concepts of good and bad were not so tricky after all.


End file.
